Synchronized Spinning: Ode on a Grecian Term

 

 

Olympic spirit’s transfused all my blood

(The Greeks had a word for it: ichor, so we’re told);

It ran in the veins of all the gods of old

As pure emotion comes to me now in a flood),

And my ichor/spirit soars with the seeker of gold,

At one with one who’d reach the pinnacled height

Of pure poetic figurative flight,

Then, letting go, in one release as bold,

Return to figure-ratedly alight.

But once?

(You saw not all the practise grunts

Have got me to this place)

One giddy flight to show off all

My metaphoric stunts

(And risk a fall

From grace)?

 

No, the spirit runs too strong in me;

The torch was handed down from gods of old

(Such flights!) I cannot let the flame grow cold;

I cannot fear my fallibility,

So up the bar I go now with another,

For I (fear naught) have set my bar as high

—See how in synchronicity I fly

Now with my spirit-figurative other

As the grand high-flying jury’s eye

Holds me in sight,

As I hold dear the bar (in fright

Of falling from this space

So flightfully above

The lowest common? or the height?)

No, for the love

Of place.

 

For I, no less than all, have come for gold,

The goal of precious mettle—gold that’s mind:

Such nuggets as are picked out and refined,

Then spun in spirit with the gods of old,

To weave some spun gold thing—so now I spin

In verse and reverse layout, high upstage

—Oh, high above, now let the jury gauge

Upon their page if I, the gold, shall win,

In classic style, as they of golden age

Olympus crowned

Olympians, so gilt-renowned

No jury can begrudge

Their place eternally

Atop that lofty hallowed Mound.

Posterity

Shall judge.

 

The jury’s surely noted, on my start,

I got off on the write iambic foot,

With each foot after just as writely put,

And yet, for all my feat, have come apart

But loose a time or two, and now they see,

By my write-handed whorls’ and twirls’ fair score,

It’s pure high-flying art for which I soar

Whose degree of difficulty’s poetry

(Compulsory release)—now hear the roar

Of adulation

For my next-to-last gyration

—Now they’re standing

(Musn’t miss the dismount trick:

Dazzling full twist revelation)

To see me stick

The landing.