In an Ivory Attic
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
My ivory attic sees me writing lines
Alone both day and night. (It isn’t like
Young Chatterton’s.’ The flash of light that shines
Comes glinting like a laser lighting strike.
In Salem one small sphere of ivory holds
Another and another and another all within
Each other’s fullest hollows. Each enfolds
An intricacy, carvings made to spin
Inside their smallnesses, but they contain
A little cosmos each of Eastern sense,
A Chinese universe in carving’s reign.
The Oriental thinking chirrs immense.
I write my tiny swirling sonnets starved
For space and yet ornately flittering, carved.
~ Phillip Whidden