Both Sides of the Moon

By Chelsea Lin & KK Apple

This pair of cento poems was crafted out of song lyrics, news articles and poetry, reflecting the moods of dark and light. Which one is sinister and which one is hopeful? Or maybe each has a little bit of dark and light…

Villain
With a swirl of harps
dipping and rising, 
he says please
I’m not myself.

What happens in between is a mystery,
chunky and noisy
He was a musician of grief,
that should have been the end of it.

Lee, however, hasn’t recovered.
Over and over again
he felt nauseated
but Lee accepted the challenge.

Please send all your 
dangerous and noble things.
I am thinking now
who’s putting needles in my baby?


In Starlight
The cosmic lost-and-found,
gone silent,
in starlight should have been
a dance of titanic forces.

It was a surprise,
it’s an intriguing mystery
of anything to eat,
one gigantic mouthful of nothing.

The stars in the knots were jiggling around,
a kind of sparkling cloak
was of the utmost importance.
What happens when 
billions of suns
meet
a kink of extra light?

Sources: Sasha Sloan, Prince, Mary Oliver, Joshua Davis in Stanford Magazine, Dennis Overbye in the New York Times.

Process

As a pair, we were exploring the cento—a form of poetry where you borrow words from other poets to make your own new, patchworked poem. We pulled inspiration from poems, but also favorite songs and recent news articles, finding it fun to cut and paste other people’s words like poetry engineers. We created new poems line by line, back and forth in Google Docs.

For some, we started with a theme and, with a stroke of serendipity, discovered unexpected ways that our source materials wove together flawlessly to fit that theme. It was insightful to explore how malleable words and phrases can be when put in different contexts. Although these poems were created with specific themes in mind, the lightness vs. darkness vibes coexist within each and are sometimes indistinguishable, creating a duo of poems that complements each other perfectly like both sides of the moon.