Alvin Knox – Page 2

At the Fountain Park

Today, children—younger, older,
black, white, and shades between—
run through the spray and spouting jets,
an impromptu game of tag with each other
and the randomly shifting streams.
They have tossed their shoes
around the fountain’s base to form
makeshift garlands of green, yellow,
red and blue. The fountain likes this.
Today, the central, vertical stream rises
one inch higher than its typical fourteen feet.
I have read the plaque on the fountain’s base.
The children, some in swimsuits, some
in clothes their parents forgot would get wet,
cavort in rings around the fountain, laughing,
except for one little girl who has stopped dead,
silent, gazing into the sky, into the invisible.
Today, she is the chosen one, the magic one
in the perfect place to see the fountain play with the sun.

Surely there are stars enought poem

It is time to reconfigure the constellations.
New stars blaze into existence, old stars
are pried from behind curtains of interstellar dust.
Surely, there are stars enough
for every god of men.

Disregard the fact that a rainbow
is only a lens of water. Throw out Lacaille.
Appropriate his rhomboidal net, his square,
his table, his furnace—
and build in my heaven a myth of the world
that allows the blade of an iris
to become invisible.

Star maps locate our sun
near the edge of the milky way,
but man is still at the center
of the known universe.

Alvin Knox is a Lecturer of English at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)
He studied Poetry/Creative Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts

At the Fountain Park | Poem by Alvin Knox

Surely There Are Stars Enough | Poem by Alvin Knox