Two Poems by George Franklin

Lot’s Lament

Because I could not see what she saw, I invented the burning city that gives no heat, I planted the pillar of salt that is no resource, And now, as their shadows wave at my feet, I imagine the horrified look she gave And salvage her look that has turned from me. I almost forgot the pillar, the unfinished temple, My marriage to impossibility: I keep finding The face that abandons me: still turning, Too violent and rapid to feel, Like colors that blend on a spinning wheel Whose motion I neither inspire nor postpone. I want to wear her, to wear her out, But my face is no more expressive than stone. Though it shatter me, I must break within Where she stares beneath my forehead’s drawn skin, Toward the mended vision reversed past my eyes, Toward a law I cannot recognize, To the haven where I am accused and disowned, Where the wheel is stopped and I break apart Into colors that I have never known.

Elegy in Broken Stanzas

George Franklin’s most recent book of poetry, Lamentations, can be found at Ristretto Books.

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George Franklin spent his youth studying (mostly Western) literature at Harvard, Brown, and Columbia, and his middle years studying (mostly Eastern) spiritual traditions in the United States and abroad. Throughout his life, he wrote constantly, primarily poetry, but deeply averse to self-promotion, published only intermittently. Although subject to bouts of severe depression, he had long periods of joyful engagement with the world around him and with a wide circle of friends and family. Gay but largely celibate for the sake of his spiritual practice, he never married. During his final years, suffering from multiple debilitating illnesses that consigned him to a nursing home, he rose daily before dawn to produce a series of astonishingly virtuosic books of poetry, memoir and literary criticism. He died at the age of 71, leaving behind a triumphant legacy in the form of his writing.