P Alvatos

Glad I was when I reached the other bank,

a love of freedom rarely felt.

Man to be poor, man to be prodigal,

the half-man searching for an ever-fleeing other half,

and the countryside not caring,

a shadow of cloud on the stream.

A cento, sometimes referred to as a “collage poem,” consists of lines from other poems cut out and reassembled.

Poems sampled Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,”  Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” Michael Field’s “O Eros of the mountains, of the earth,” AK Ramanujan’s, “Elements of Composition,” Philip Larkin’s “MCMVI,” Yeats’s “Easter 1916”

Note: Michael Field was the pseudonym of Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper, pictured below.