Meryl Natchez: Poem

Poem with a Line from Amy Clampitt 

Car door handles don’t appear very often in poems, or
door knobs in general. Or TVs or the programs on
them,
or zip ties, or toilets. Though any single,

ordinary object in the early twenty-first century might
blossom into poetry:

The faintly grainy extruded plastic housing of the
computer, the glow of its backlit screen,
the muffled,
sibilant touch

of the serviceable QWERTY keyboard, tapping,
tapping,
 spewing thought into space
 during each of the
86,400 seconds in a day, wired or wireless,

email and podcast and blog.

Time will sift
 the syllables, smoothing 
and sorting, just as
waves 
turn cliffs into sand. For the ocean, nothing is
beneath consideration

“Iceland (Southern Round)” © Keith Moul


Art information

  • “Iceland 144-1 (Southern Round)” © Keith Moul; used by permission.

Meryl Natchez’s most recent book is a bilingual volume of translations from the Russian, Poems from the Stray Dog Café: Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Gumilev. She is cotranslator of Tadeusz Borowski: Selected Poems and contributor to Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness.

Her book of poems, Jade Suit, appeared in 2001. She's published poems and translations in many magazines and anthologies, including the Pinch Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Lyric, Moth, and Canary.

Natchez founded and managed a technical writing business, TechProse, now owned and managed by the employees. She was cofounder of the nonprofit Opportunity Junction, now in it’s fifteenth year, and raised four children.

She blogs at Dactyls & Drakes.

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