Alan Botsford

Alan Botsford is author of Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore (Sage Hill Press, 2010) as well as two poetry collections. He served for eleven years as editor of Poetry Kanto, Japan’s oldest bi-lingual poetry journal. He teaches at a university in Yokohama and lives with his wife, illustrator Minako Saitoh, in Kamakura.

A Different Sort of Light

We are, it seems, all under some guy
Way up there in the vast sky.
It's a man's world from above,
It's true, one we can't afford not to love.
But what motions from below
Is what I root for, just so you know.
It's a thrill to be on site
Of a different sort of light.
But whose dream, then, are we in,
You'd ask: happy ending, or ruin?
Faithful to prophets of Uncle-Sam-I-Am,
I riff on the endurance of time.