Small Furies


Beware silence
distrust stillness
things that lie beneath the surface
do not seem

Death leaps up sudden
like trout from quiet water
snatching fl?ies mid-air
or a car over-leaping the banks
of a sidewalk
pedestrians scattered
mid-stream


Questions and Answers

What inspired “Small Furies”?

“Small Furies” came to me while walking down a street after work one day. I remembered an anecdote by a friend of mine how he’d heard about a pedestrian killed by a car that swerved onto a sidewalk. That story worked its way into my poem.

What poetic techniques did you use in “Small Furies”?

This poem, unlike much of my poetry, is short and concise. I didn’t work on it very much. It came to me spontaneously in more or less the state it’s in today. It consists mostly of a single metaphor built around water images.


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