Written for:  dVerse Poets Pub - Poetics: 
The Charms of Samuel Greenberg  (posted by Laura Bloomsbury)

"Searching for inspiration for this Poetics prompt, I first fell upon Rimbaud which led me to Hart Crane who surreptitiously resurrected an “impoverished, proto-surrealist poet, who never published a word in his life“.1 That was Samuel Greenberg (1893-1917), to whom Crane gave the epithet ‘the embryo Rimbaud’ and from whom he plagiarised/ lifted/ rewrapped a large number of lines and imagery from Greenberg’s writings.

“His favorite word for what he sought in poetry was “charm,” and this poem reads like a charm bracelet on which Greenberg has dangled some tantalising ‘duologues’. Here are some others from that poem:-

Dim Accuracy; Candle salve; Consumed moon;
Eyes jealousy; Fouls deviation; Grey life;
Hearts brow; Lucid farrows; Nulling marrows;
Painted mirth; Pale heat; Palmed rose;
Pearls from tissue; Pellucid quest; Royal flesh;
Skulls of saints; Slime pigments; Spiritual songs;
Solitudes wish; Times chant; Yellow dreams;

"Your challenge is to take FIVE (no more or less) from these 21 ‘charms’ and string them together in a poem with style and word length of your choosing."


A grayness in my life
consumed even the moon.
You happened by, and painted
my life with mirth, yellow
dreams of daffodils.  In quiet
times, I hear the faint chant
of chimes.  Gray days fade
like morning fog.

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