A fourteen-line poem on Adoration
1. It does not take much
2. Half an hour here, half an hour there
3. It’s not a “presence” I adore
4. The erotically swollen moon
5. Let me go, friends, companions
6. The soldier watches his kid in a play
7. He seems nothing less or more than “foreigner”
8. Grass. Dirt.
9. The bottle broke and all the women gathered shards
10. The effect was of inflation
11. There was only one alive moment in the day
12. Either I loved myself or I loved you
13. Just like a mother to say that
14. “Do you become very much?” she wrote
Copyright © 2014 by Julie Carr. Used with permission of the author.
“I’ve been writing these fourteen-line poems as a way to play with the sonnet and also to push enjambment a bit further down the road. The numbers are meant to be heard, as a way to propel the poem forward. This one (and some others) borrows words from Jean-Luc Nancy’s Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II, a book I happen to adore.”
—Julie Carr
Julie Carr
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Julie Carr was selected by Cole Swensen for the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Prize for her debut collection Mead: An Epithalamion.