Verse Wisconsin 105| Lester Smith

Jenny By Sunset

Another sunset spills across the bay.
Subtle isn’t what it hopes to be.
Nor should I with you here standing by.
Come to me; let me draw loose your bow.
Forget for now what’s not, or is, taboo.

—Lester Smith, Elkhorn, WI

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Lester Smith is a blue-collar boy turned writer. He has been employed as a short-order cook, sheet-metal worker, welder, licensed practical nurse, game designer, javascript instructor, webmaster, and—most recently—researcher and poet for an educational publishing house. He also serves as the current president of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Les subscribes to Salman Rushdie’s idea that “A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”

I was thinking about subtlety —how much of nature isn’t— and the line “Another sunset spills across the bay” spilled across my brain. The rest followed as a morph-rhyme poem. In this case, the morph rhyme doesn’t support more than one stanza, but sometimes no more need be said.