The Challenge: “Bee Still” and “Ascension”

Several weeks ago (May 8) I issued a challenge to readers to figure out the connection between my son Luke’s poem “Bee Still” and my poem “Ascension.”  Several of you responded and one of you, my boyhood friend John Rozeboom, got it mostly right.  

If you read the last word of each line of my poem--in order--you will have Luke's poem.  This device--placing the words of another poet's poem (or just a line from the poem) at the end of each line of your poem--is called a Golden Shovel--invented by a friend of the great Afro-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks.  He asked friends and fellow poets to write a Golden Shovel poem to honor Brooks and got a whole book of Golden Shovel poems.

 Here's another Golden Shovel poem I wrote using the words of just the last line of another of Luke's poems and placing each one, in order, at the end of each line of my poem.

From "Where the Spokes Were Missing"

. . . I saw this.  And some other night I'll see this  late sky clean
and deep and seasoned with a million dancing stars, and I'll believe
the ancients, who said the universe was ribbed and spindled,
shot through with spokes ascending from earth to heaven and spinning.
And where the spokes were missing; there the light shone through.

Old Songs, Almost Forgotten

 I like to think they’re still back there somewhere and

if I sing long enough my mind can take me where

the music can still be heard, a baseball card clothes-pinned to the

bicycle spokes,

the song going up the scale, a happy whirr

as I went faster, then dying as I slowed and stopped, missing

a measure before passing the melody on to Mothers calling their children in for bed.  There

is a sadness in their two-note sing-song “John-ny, Da-vid,” the

heartache at the sound, the porch light

cutting a lucent circle on the stoop.  Gradually the music came

to an end, and in the darkness only the stars shone through.