"Pattern and Snarl" – A New Poem by Amit Majmudar
Read the latest poem that was "inspired by a delight in design and pattern"
- By Amit Majmudar
- Smithsonian magazine, September 2012, Subscribe
Life likes a little mess. All patterns need a snarl.
The best patterns know how best to heed a snarl.
Every high style, every strict form was once nonce.
The best way to save a snagged pattern? Repeat the snarl.
Eden used to snow in fractals, rain in syncopated runs.
Adam never imagined he would hear its seedlings snarl.
Tug the wrong thread, and your wool sweater vanishes at once.
Death pulls at a wisp of us—and just like that, it’s freed the snarl.
What is it about order that we love? This sense,
Maybe, that a secret informs the pattern?
Is it a toddler’s joy in doing things again?
Is it the entropy in us that warms to pattern?
I never intended this line to rhyme on again again.
Then again, sometimes it's the snarl that adorns the pattern.
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