This is no longer your father's American conservatism. Who gets to define it in 2021?
Planet Blue
July 11, 2016
This poem appears in the Summer 2016 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.
You stroll across the surface of planet blue,
completely unaware, either night or day,
just how lovely you are. Without a clue
how all the cosmos around you is blown away:
how rainbows fall at your feet, how storms subside,
how the sun implodes in a shower of diamond light,
how bewildered heavenly bodies collide,
and the solar winds pacify the night;
how all the constellations realign
their tributary specks of flame
into a dazzling, exotic, erotic design,
spelling out your lovely name;
how cosmic space retracts itself in scale,
and time, self-destructively, swallows its tail.
William Baer has written and edited fifteen books, among them The Unfortunates, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1997, and “Bocage” and Other Sonnets, recipient of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Baer is the founding editor of The Formalist, a literary journal dedicated to formalist poetry, and serves as a contributing editor of Measure. Until his recent retirement, Baer taught creative writing, cinema, and world cultures at the University of Evansville.
Get the Collegiate Experience You Hunger For
Your time at college is too important to get a shallow education in which viewpoints are shut out and rigorous discussion is shut down.
Explore intellectual conservatism
Join a vibrant community of students and scholars
Defend your principles
Join the ISI community. Membership is free.
You might also like
Two Tales of Low Culture
Upper classes who once prized Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring now esteem no art higher than rap and Miami Vice.
Art for the Country’s Sake
Can immersion in great literature prevent American decline into a brutal empire populated by shallow, servile citizens?