Today’s choice

Previous poems

Charles G. Lauder

 

 

 

Craftsmanship

beneath night’s skin he unearths raw stones
serrated     encrusted    enigmatic    cold

tumbling them in two-twenty grit wears away the dull
four hundred    six hundred highlights the delicate

garnet’s exposed seam     agate’s brittle dendrites
whilst softest serpentine disintegrates to dust

in quiet solitude he worries
facets of captured moonlight won’t be enough

in the age of electric light    blue light
boutiques and diners that never shut

the glow of irrelevance radiates

 

 

Charles G. Lauder, Jr, is an American poet who lives in the UK. He’s the author of the collection The Aesthetics of Breath (V.Press, 2019) and three pamphlets, the most recent being Year of the Rat (Blueprint Poetry Press, 2025).

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