“II” by Frederick Smock

231 Replies
click for more info

There was a gate,
old and green,
that swung in the wind.
No fence stretched away
on either side anymore,
if ever one had.
The gate stood alone,
open on the meadow,
a seamless drift of land.
To my eye, that gate
organized the whole field
of vision. Everything
circled around the gate,
or radiated out from it,
or passed through it.
Surely I could never think
of crossing that field
and not passing through.
There was an inevitability
to it, and a promise that,
after passing through,
something remarkable
was sure to be revealed
on the other side.

–Frederick Smock,
The Deer at Gethsemani: Eclogues
Accents Publishing

Frederick SmockFrederick Smock is associate professor of English at Bellarmine University, where he received the 2005 Wyatt Faculty Award. He has published four previous collections of poems with Larkspur Press. He is also the author of Craft-talk: On Writing Poems, and Pax Intrantibus: A Meditation on the Poetry of Thomas Merton. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, The Louisville Review, The Merton Journal (UK), Poetry East, Trajectory, and other journals.

231 thoughts on ““II” by Frederick Smock”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *