Leland James
was a recent winner of the Portland Pen Poetry Contest and the Writers’ Forum Short Poem contest. He was runner up for the Fish International Poetry Prize and received the Franklin-Chistoph Merit Award for poetry.
His poems and short fiction have placed or received honorable mentions in several other poetry contests, including the St. Louis Writer’s Guild, Tom Howard, New Millennium Writers, and By Line.
His work has appeared in publications in the U.S., England, Ireland, Scotland, and Israel, including Reach Poetry, Magma, Osprey Journal, Barnwood International Poetry Mag, and Carillon Magazine.
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String Thing
Behold, a brave new physics—
As it were,
A universe of froward verse:
Stanzas strung of unlike beads,
Fractious dactyls and shuffling iambs enjambing
Upon an undulating Alexandrines’s tail
—a rhyme sprung, unrav’ling.
The right is left and upside down,
Reality, a squiggly noun.
It bends the mind, this braney thing,
A can of worms, a ball of string!
Out to encompass—everything.
Ten or eleven space-time dimensions,
New worlds of quantum chromodynamics …
Out, Out! Particle Physics, dim points of light.
The Quark is dead? Long live the String!
All hail, Monarch of things.
A free-verse universe unloosed,
God only knows:
A patchwork quilt, some piece of work,
an extra-dimensional supersymmetry
of dippsy doodles.
Roll over Beethoven,
Brubeck’s got the groove.
Yet—
just for one damn old-time minute, wait!
’Haps in this upside-down cake view,
M-theory may say nothing new
—may say what you always knew.
Was not rhyme from day-one sprung,
The dippsy’s doodled all along?
Hidden gravities, things deep, unseen,
Impossible things that simply must be,
The great Mystery,
unraveling.
Well, anyone who’s ever loved
or wondered at the stars above
knows this.
It doesn’t take a quantum physicist.
We may never see the Forces lurking
Behind the curtain, know for certain
anything
that we might chisel into stone.
Save that curiosity and care
endure,
The superstrings beneath it all.
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