To welcome the new year, I turn to May Swenson and her poem “Four-Word Lines” for a prompt that I enjoy doing. Swenson’s poem explains itself and its procedures better than a paraphrase:
Your eyes are just
like bees, and I
feel like a flower.
Their brown power makes
a breeze go over
my skin. When your
lashes ride down and
rise like brown bees’
legs, your pronged gaze
makes my eyes gauze.
I wish we were
in some shade and
no swarm of other
eyes to know that
I’m a flower breathing
bare, laid open to
your bees’ warm stare.
I’d let you wade
in me and seize
with your eager brown
bees’ power a sweet
glistening at my core.
“The poem is breathtaking,” the writer Sharon Preiss observes. “The precise and compact ‘four-word lines’ move the poem ‘forward,’ yet the form forces line breaks that slow the reader down so that she can revel in the mellifluous aural flow of the poem. The sound of longing that the interlinked long i’s and e’s create in the first few lines then floats down and through the lilting feeling of relief the double f and l sounds create in ‘feel like a flower.’”
Here are poems that May Swenson’s poem inspired: https://theamericanscholar.org/tributes-to-may-in-january/
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Author: The Best American Poetry
