John's PoetryI seldom write poetry. It seldom occurs to me. Most of the poetry I have written (aside from doggerel for birthday notes) has been for inclusion in novels. There's not much of that, either—except for numerous cantos from The Järnhann Saga, which readers (and listeners!) seem to like very much.If you prefer light-hearted doggerel to "straight" poetry, go to the end of this page for a piece called "Virtuality," and lemme know what you think of it. First, though, a short poem inspired by a mountain I know intimately. I've used this poem in two novels (is that cheating?)—The Varkaus Conspiracy, and The Reality Matrix.
San Francisco Peaks*
by John Dalmas Primal mountain bursting long ago, rupturing the darkness with your might, shrouded with clouds of ash and fumes that glowed and pulsed and shuddered in the night, your shoulders flowing red with molten rock, blast furnace heat and sullen light. Is that you? Is that you so calm beneath the sky, slopes serene in snow, your forest frosted white? Ah, I know you in many moods, green, with branches dripping rain, yellow with aspen or blind with blizzard. I know you now! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ * The San Francisco Peaks lie just north of Flagstaff, Arizona. They are the eroded rim of a gigantic volcano, a ring of peaks surrounding a caldera, a huge, boulder-jumbled crater. You like spruce? It has spruce by the square mile. Aspen? It’s feet are buried with aspen. Snow? One April about 1972 they closed the ski resort because the lift towers were buried! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*The Järnhann Saga exists only as separated cantos and verses, but there are quite a few of them. If you like the sample presented here, let me know (dalmas@earthlink.net) and I'll add more later. Or you can find them in the last three of the Yngling series, and The Orc Wars. I can also include a "historical" discussion of the post-plague evolution of 29th century Scandinavian, the language of the poems. (I'm the only authority on 29th century Scandinavian.)
Virtuality
by John Dalmas Marching through Georgia with a finger up my nose, I picked a purple dandelion and thought it was a rose, Cump Sherman looked at me and told my friends that I was crazy, that I had picked a touch-me-not and thought it was a daisy. I was a little miffed at such a mis-repre-sentation, and so he had me court mar-tialled for in-subor-dination. The court called in a botanist to settle who was right, a forensical taxonomist who wasn’t very bright. “They’re both Compositae,” he said, “the dandelion and daisy, and thus,” he argued, “technically the dif-fer-ence is hazy. In a sense they both are right, and who can say they’re not?” “I can,” the general replied, and had the fellow shot. So I booted up Gray’s Manual, by Microsoft you know, with hypertext, and color holographs that flower and grow. “Smell this,” I said, “and you will know at once that I was right.” He sniffed, and sneezed 500 times, it took him half the night. For it was none of the above, he learned to his displeasure, but virtual goldenrod, with virtual pollen beyond mmeasure. “Case dismissed!” the general said when he’d run out of snot, then had me taken to the yard, against the wall, and shot. Interesting, I told myself, as I viewed my empty body, I’d have to say that both our mental processes were shoddy. Reality is virtual in either case, you see, though one is somewhat subtler, the “real” reality. The general too looked down, for he had also died I found, he’d sneezed his brains right out his nose, to soak into the ground. “Ah lad,” he said, “we both were wrong, and therein lies a lesson, which when we’ve learned just what it is will surely be a blessin’.” We shook on that, and both agreed reality is a school, where we’d been students many times, it real-ly was cool. And when we’d had a little break to digest our education, we’d both go down and have another re-matri-culation.
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John Dalmas © 2003–2008 |