Immovable
Who lay siege to us, we will make regret
their grave mistake, repel them from our walls,
pursue them to the sea, ignore their calls
for mercy, see their scions don’t forget.
The souvenirs of battle we send let
would-be invaders know how far pride falls
before our weapons; every scrap appalls.
Who’s ever breached our works? No army yet.
Yet they keep coming at us, sword and lance
and bow. How many generations now?
They should have learned their limits long ago.
There is no limit to them, though. A glance
informed us, at the first, not when or how,
but that our conqueror would lay us low.
Port Call
My thought is, every tear that falls fell at
the start and will be falling at the end.
You laugh at my best thoughts, including that
one. Good. We’re helping this sad world defend
against the tides of sorrow that extend
from alpha to omega. Rise is fall
and fall is rise, on this you may depend,
all genius says so. Walk through any wall
of thought, we find another just as tall.
We walk through that wall, too. We’ll finally see—
You know as much as I do of the sprawl
of keels in this fleet harbor. Stand alee.
Take time and twine it in your hands, weave in
loose strands, tie knots, feel oceans tug and spin.
Dan Campion is the author of Star Anchors (2026), Calypso (1981), The Mirror Test (2024), A Playbill for Sunset (2022), and Peter De Vries and Surrealism (1995) and is a co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981, 2nd ed. 1998, 3rd ed. 2019). Dan’s poetry has appeared previously in Grand Little Things and in Able Muse, Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, THINK, and many other magazines.
Grand Little Things 