Golden Shovel & Sacred Space

NovPAD 2024 • Days 15 & 16

This month’s theme: “Where I Am: Poems of Place”

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11/15 • Golden Shovel

A golden shovel poem quotes another piece of literature as the last word of each line. This one is written after “Love is not strength / Though it endures all things” – from Love Is Not Strength by Randy Edwards. His full poem is linked at the end of this post.

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Pity often masquerades as love
But wearing garments does not transmute “is”
Into another form. So treasure not
Your pity. It may take a swell of strength
To throw it from its usurped throne and though
It struggles, make it sit again where it
May serve. There is a pity that endures
Beyond a notion—pity drawn in all
Respects from Love, supreme above all things.

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11/16 • Sacred Space

This is a Spenserian stanza: 8 lines in iambic pentameter and an 6-foot¹ final line.

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We dwelt in silver tents on pilgrimage 
like Israel and sheltered in the arms
of cedar roots and river’s sweeping edge.
Psalms thirty-two and then nineteen forearmed
us for the coming day when the alarm
would drive us to the fray, when nature’s voice
would hold us in its sway but not disarmed.
To her we’d pay some homage—but by choice
and by her witness in another Lord rejoice.

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Love Is Not Strength

Photo by Lisa Berry on Unsplash

1. A “foot” in metric poetry is a stressed syllable. In this case, because the line is iambic, there are an equal number of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables.