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Poet's Choice

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Twelve white hats bright in the long night

We are not frightened by bullets and bombs in the air

Only by dew wetting our lime-scented hair.

This poem in a Western form, written when Western bombs were falling on Vietnam, appears in a new anthology edited by Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland, The Making of a Sonnet. Boland's own book Against Love Poetry contains a poem that illustrates what I mean by saying the recipe varies: in the case, 14 lines without end rhyme, incorporating the title as the first words of a sentence:

Is It Still the Same

young woman who climbs the stairs,

who closes a child's door,

who goes to her table

in a room at the back of a house?

The same unlighted corridor?

The same night air

over the wheelbarrows and rain-tanks?

The same inky sky and pin-bright stars?