Golden Shovel Messiah, Part I

Valleys, rough places, and such

Mario Tama, Getty Images

A Golden Shovel is a poetic form invented by writer Terrance Hayes about fifteen human years ago. He created it to honor Gwendolyn Brooks, one of my genius poetic beloveds, most famous for her poem “We Real Cool.” See the epigraph? That’s where Hayes got the form’s catchy name.

So Hayes takes Brooks’s poem and writes a new one, with the last word of each of his lines coming from Brooks. People continued writing these Golden Shovels in honor of Brooks, and now the form has spread to integrate the work of other poets. While “We Real Cool” is brief enough for Hayes to incorporate every word, the form typically takes one line from a poem and uses each word of that line as an end-word in a line for a new poem. It’s easier to just show rather than explain, sort of like my parables.

In the spirit of my birthday month, I’m writing some golden shovels using lyrics from Handel’s oratorio about Yours Truly. My scribe Tania is particularly fond of this part from Isaiah 40, as she is often found singing it whilst scrubbing the bits off the bottom of her rice cooker:

Every valley shall be exalted, and ev’ry mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain. 

Now check out my Golden Shovel, conjunctions and articles plucked out because I don't like line breaks that sucketh:

Every Valley

It’s almost the new year, and your every
possible future lingers like smog in the valley:
formless and void, but you know the particulates shall
set your lung-trees ablaze. Your dread’s exalted
with every morning alarm, every laced shoe, every
chirruped How are you? I kneaded your mountain
of garbage into a fearful, yet climbable, hill
this year, fetid crags of diagnosis and loss made
softer with moss and ferns. You twisted low
in the muck, gulping, shoulder blades crooked
from months of buckets straining the yoke. Yet straight
up you rose and rambled—remember?—rough
and sweaty, skin tinged green, heaving into places
that oh, you would go, slippery and anything but plain.