Claudia Ann Seaman Award
The Spent Mind’s Lament
Alex Jones
Longmeadow, MA
Longmeadow High School
Poetry
It is at these times,
When the gavel of fatigue doth rap upon its weary patron’s cavern
And the cerebral current comes perplexed with its own spiteful turbidity
And the abyss of delightful abstraction lies but a dormant and defeated tarn
That the mind knows no satisfaction, save in what was hitherto felt
And shall be felt anon.
When present delivers naught but threadbare contemplations,
And the splendid cranial edifice that was yesterday’s toil
Broods in shambles beside the Pompeiian ruins,
And its crumbling sides, winking in spite,
Goad the vexèd architect.
It is at these moments, that consciousness doth make his fateful inquest
As to whether he strides to animate,
Or suffers himself to rest.
EDITORIAL PRAISE
It’s almost ironic that a poem about creative rot prods the reader to think so much. Like the mind itself, this piece has many layers—every read, it seems to go deeper.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Jones attended Longmeadow High School in Longmeadow, MA, but at the time of writing this he is a first-year at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. He was an Executive Editor for Polyphony when he tragically aged out of the magazine this summer. He misses the late-night edits. Sort of.