- John Meyering
Three cube poems // John Meyering
I am an architect living in the Shenandoah Valley, designing buildings by day, and building with words by night. On an overcast December day, while in Architecture School, I opened a leather pouchful of 21 cubes, bearing a simple English word on each of their faces – this being the game Sentence Cube Scrabble. I proceeded to engage a literary friend in battle, each sparring to compose as long a sentence as possible with the 21 randomly-tossed words facing us, in turn. Then, we had an idea. Sitting side-by-side, we again rolled the cubes, and searched this new combination of words for what they could tell us, began arranging these into lines of poetry.
Cube Poetry was born.
Alone afterwards, I allowed the cubes to further force me to squeeze meaning from our simplest vocabulary, experimenting with more stories of only 21 words each. In time, I put away the cubes and wrote longer poems, but always with a reverence for brevity and the mystery of pouring thought into the children of our alphabet.
-John Meyering
Hate, when held
Hate, when held
is a cold lady
I ate of my bare, hard heart for her
and tasted a white beast
To please you
"To please you
I shall pluck the heart of a child"
(red fruit)
Later
I smeared new joy over your face
Why I got up
Why I got up:
(a small thing)
This dirty face
saw clean heart
Laugh, and our time may live
-from me
//