final thoughts of january on an april journey

by Jake Sheff

“The unrecognized genius—that’s an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one—the genius recognized too well? ... [D]o you understand about the men who see it and don’t want it?”

          -Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Rebellious umbrellas made of Dyer’s woad

Are among the garden’s xanthic exigencies

Today. The toads depend on one righteous woad

Each generation to dream the exigencies

That sustain the world. The Babylonian sage

I’m reading, Praise by name and by nature, taught

The marigold how to love the lyre-leaf sage.

Last winter (in the Adamic language) taught

Stupidity how to march, so now the spring

Feels “too academic” on its journey north.

The painful feet of the resurrected spring

Belong to the world. My fancy migrates north

When my heart goes west – each resurrected year

Oppresses midnight’s flood like a tansy does,

But not unjustly. Heavenly standards year

In, year out time travel, like a pansy does,

For all the marbles. “If that’s a wonder drug,

Explain the pillbox’s poor health!” In your middy,

You sank me like a dreadnought. Is there a drug

For the neap tide of my neuropeptides? Midday

Kvetching by a gravestone – of all the flowers,

At one o’clock, witch-alder’s the gravest one.

The fourth month’s the most forward one – how it flowers

With more felicitations than does month one!

Winter’s longueurs – democracy’s second soul

Departs the nation’s capital when the song

Of autumn’s insects takes effect. April’s soul

Is always torn; it’s not a bad-looking song.

The pace of May should be glacial, happiness

Should swell with priestly persistence only then…

Let total depravity’s two ha’pennies

Be tzedakah till the days no longer lengthen. 

Photo of Jake Sheff

BIO: Jake Sheff is a pediatrician and US Air Force veteran. He’s published a full-length collection of formal poetry, A Kiss to Betray the Universe (White Violet Press), along with three chapbooks: Looting Versailles (Alabaster Leaves Publishing), The Rites of Tires (SurVision) and The Seagull’s First One Hundred Seguidillas (Alien Buddha Press).