The Campanile A knell will sound regardless of who hears or if there’s no one left to hear. A storm will toll the bell, a sexton with no tears to shed, no semblance of a human form. Or else the bell will hang there silently until its yoke dissolves and down it flies, the clapper blanging one last misery in flight, one muffled drumbeat where it lies. Unless there was no bell or tower, rope to pull or sound to travel, from the start, solidity a philosophic trope, a substanceless creator’s term of art. The campanile’s loyal. There it stands, all readiness to heed the next commands.
Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). Selections of his poems will be issued by the Ice Cube Press and the MadHat Press in 2022.
Amethyst Review 