Cheese Poetry

Have the poets really been silent? Got a cheese poem?  Send it in.

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A poet’s hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.

W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)

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Sonnet to a Stilton Cheese

Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;
England has need of thee, and so have I-
She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour,
League after grassy league from Lincoln tower
To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.
Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,
Like a tall green volcano rose in power.
Plain living and long drinking are no more,
And pure religion reading ‘Household Words’,
And sturdy manhood sitting still all day
Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;
While my digestion, like the House of Lords,
The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

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Swiss Cheese

I never thought the moon
looked like Swiss cheese.
From Pennsylvania it’s merely
a cloudy marble brushed
with blue. But if I ever
saw a moon sandwiched between
rye and honey-baked ham,
I would spread sunny yellow
mustard atop
and give you a taste
of my universe.

-Wes Ward
Wes Ward is a teacher of poetry-and more-at Big
Spring High School in Newville, Pennsylvania, an
agricultural community.

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CHEESE STORM

The first flakes fell before Barnaby’s opened for breakfast.
Farmers flapped their hats.
Early laundry whitened on the lines.
A housecat lapped her powdered back and bit herself.
Hiding under fenders, dozing on the picnic tables in the
shelter house or watching from the ends of drains, cats
had made up their minds.
Woodwork sighed mice by the million.
Children sledded on the hill behind the Home, tossed balls
to the dogs, and barefoot made great men.
Tommy Jacob made a Lincoln.
Noon the drifts began to sweat, the drains ran whey, and
the great men wet with buttermilk fed many happy cats.

Chris Clendenin

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AMONTILLADO

A year in the basement
and you can hear the roots continue
netting the four gray walls
a year growing darker in knitwork

The toadstools don’t gain a glow so much
as the seepage in the air around them
blackens the background for contrast
and the wine and Time in the same relation

The pipelengths forget if what face scampered
through them gluts them now; the bulb
imploded months ago, what are these flickering
moths in the corners?

Mold on the brie, the bleu, the brick.
A year in the basement: a year in the hole
beneath a man and woman
The wind: a moan

through the swiss cheese.

Albert Goldbarth

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