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Hayden

What did I know, what did I know

Of gazing silences and terrored stone

Brilliances; beauty of what’s hardbitten

The auroral darkness which is God

Then you arrived, meditative, ironic

My head gripped in bony vice

Mouth of agony shaping a cry it cannot utter

What did I know, what did I know

Of a changing permanence

The stains and dirty tools of struggle

Weaving a wish and a weariness together

Years before your time. Years and years

I gaze through layered light

Within the rock of the undiscovered suns

I see, I walk with you among

The landscape lush, metallic, flayed

Behind us, beyond us now

The very sunlight here seems flammable

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The language about poetry

From aubade to zuihitsu, 207 definitions of the forms, figures, and schools that shape the line.

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