The Epitome of Everything

                                                                                             “Across the pale parabola of joy”
                                                                                             —P. G. Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith

Across the pale parabola of joy,
Beyond the fountain spouting youthful streams,
Beneath the universal truth of dreams,
Eluding even Everyman’s envoy
And looping past the point where paradox
Is juxtaposed on marrow meeting bone,
Above the tyrannies of ticks and tocks,
The Answer lies—or stands, or sits—alone.
There, where the questions quake outside his gates,
The crux of time’s eternity awaits.

Cynthia Erlandson’s poems have appeared in Modern Age, First Things, and elsewhere.

Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our age—to what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called “the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.”