Vox Populi
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Chard deNiord: Erebus
If I had waited for you to exit Erebus
into the light I would have grown so old
in the second or two you needed to emerge
completely from the darkness you wore
so gorgeously as Hades gown, I would
have wondered then if we could have lived
forever then and still continued to love
as we did. This was the error at the heart
of my desire that left me with only my memory
of you and the false belief that we could.
This is the river’s music that still plays
like the wind in its accompaniment
to the only song I know how to sing
whose chorus repeats again and again
between the lyrics to my dirge of losing you.
Copyright 2025 Chard deNiord
Chard deNiord is the author of many books of poetry including In My Unknowing (University of Pittsburgh Press 2020) and Westminster West (Tupelo 2024). He serves as board member of the Sundog Poetry Center in Vermont, is the essay editor at Plume Poetry Journal, and lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife, Liz.
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Slept late this morning. Awoke shaking from a bad dream. Decided to read VP before getting up. There is still beauty in poetry. It is still worth getting up.
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I love this new slant on Orpheus and the beautiful language and imagery that this poem of love and loss is “the only song I know how to sing.” Myth and the dream-like images and the poem’s music! So wonderful.
P.S. I love hitting “Like” on comments but right now my accounts won’t let that happen.
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And suddenly my “Likes” work again….
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I have always loved the way Chard’s poems—through his beautiful language, syntax, and imagery, through dream, myth, or the imagination—offer us access to a world beyond the literal, enacting Paul Eluard’s idea that “There is another world, but it is in this one.”
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Yes!
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Wow – how gorgeous. This is lyrical, this is music written in words.
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Chard is a lyric genius, able to make the world sing in harmony with our desire.
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Yes!
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And so we have a lyric poet on our hands this morning of my late wakening. He does- with the same tools—what I ever aspire and fail often to see myself do. There is a crystallization happening and the certain thing human beings “perish daily for the lack thereof.”
Its a perfect ending to a hideous year.
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Thank you so much, Sean, for your many brilliant comments on the poems in VP!
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