A Connoisseur of Wind
He knows we cannot trust the wind, and yet,
“Listen,” he says, and so we do, and wait,
patiently, underneath the frozen trees.
But hearing nothing in the wind but wind,
we start to leave. He shakes a finger, no,
and smiles, and so—hoping to catch a hint
of what it is he thinks he hears in all
this steady innuendo of the end—
we wait some more. But listening for what?
More windy variations on a theme
of nothing? A whispered rumor of what is?
We watch him, as he smiles, eyes closed,
swaying in rhythm with the ebb and swell,
then looks at us, and bows, and leaves us here.
……
This poem is from the chapbook Some Moments in a Gentle War by David MacRae Landon (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/some-moments-in-a-gentle-war-by-david-macrae-landon/
This collection of #poems borrows its title from a line of the second poem, “Kleos, or Fame”. “Kleos” also begins the story of the war, “gentle” because it is a commitment, at times a struggle, to care: for each other and our world, from moment to moment, from day to day. To fight the gentle war is to live in opposition to another #war, a war associated in several of the poems with “#history”: reckless ambition, abuse of power, indifference to suffering, violence. There are moments—at times mysterious—when we feel the gentle war may win, so let’s celebrate, let’s remember those moments. In iambic pentameter? It is a meter usually more vigorous than gentle. But there are moments we want to remember and celebrate with vigor!
David MacRae Landon is the Bishop Juhan Professor of Theatre Emeritus at the University of the South in Sewanee. He won the American Academy Poetry Prize as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he was class poet. More recent poems have appeared in Able Muse (Write Prize), Southwest Review (Marr Prize, runner-up), Georgia Review (Lorraine Williams Prize, featured finalist), and elsewhere. As an actor he has performed with the Nashville, Alabama, and New York Shakespeare Festivals, with the Provincetown and New Orleans Tennessee Williams’ Festivals. Several of his undergraduate poems were republished in the Harvard Advocate Centennial Anthology (T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, etc.).
The Paddock Review 