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Write On Magazine's Featured Poet


Professor Glenn R. Swetman

William Carey College
Gulfport, Mississippi


The Fiery Death of the Wolf Man

By Glenn R. Swetman

Clean and time-loved
with anxious beauty waiting for him
when the full moon outs from the cloud
he transmogrifies.
Hirsute and fanged, then, the lycanthrope
scales walls made ugly by moonlight.
The moon is a silver-bullet hole
in the heart of the sky,
and behind it the yellow color
of a beast's yellow eye.

Why are the young sacrificed here?
Couldn't he be gnarled to begin?
And why do we sit in our limited dark
and imagine trembling beauty disemboweled?
Why is the theatron filled with this fake
too horrid to make a myth?

The Wolf Man snarls
between us and the cinema door;
we walk through his fuzzy here-and-now
like ether,
and we smile;
for outside, the moon
is a vague wound in a formless sky,
and behind it the yellow color
of the beast's vacant eye.

Somewhere a Viking Prays to Thor

By Glenn R. Swetman

God's Sunhammer, pound the bronze earth,
smash its summer-green design
to desert dust. Clang on the brown dirt
with a deep gong of umber circles.
Ring through the seasons until the hot red
autumn sparks need cooling of dripping cold.
I know, when the earth is roughed out
you must rest and put out the forge fires.
And this stillness I interrupt with prayer
before you again begin emblazoning this shield
(fine lines raised upon the winter-worn
smooth of metal cold). No warrior may
sleep out his days. No artisan may be content.
Strike with your Sunhammer, Lord.

 

To Zereda

By Glenn R. Swetman

All I want from you is one dream, and I
shall steal it if I can. My craven soul
will skulk into the dark room where you lie,
pluck the dream from air as it begins, roll

and shape it to my end. And what a dream
I make it! First I move you sleeping from
the dark to an abandoned beach where cream-
white sand cools light from white-hot sun, and thrum

of sea signs silence into sleep. Then I
hide behind the sun, light my soul and change
with half-enchantment nearly to a phoenix, my
form a man, yet fire-feathered, strange

demi-angel of flame; and as your eyes
flutter in the warmth, I burst through the sun,
descend in burning deiform, surprise
and cover you with flame-soft feathers, stun

you with softness as your touch explodes me
into smoke. And all I hope, for my sake,
is that in your hair one small orange feather be
left to brush your eyelid as you wake.

 

About the poet...

Dr. Swetman is a retired professor of English at Nicholls State University, in Thibodaux, Lousiana, where he coordinated the creative writing program. He is the current writer in residence at William Carey College in Gulfport, Mississippi.

Author, writer, teacher, actor... Glenn Robert Swetman was born in Biloxi, Mississippi and educated in Mississippi and Louisiana, receiving his Ph.D. from Tulane University. His many prizes and awards include: Honorary Fellow and Honorary Doctorate, International Boswellian Institute; Yokosuka Black Ship Festival Haiku Award, Japan; Outstanding Educator of America, 1971. He is listed in the International Who's Who in Poetry, Contemporary Authors, and Who's Who in the World. He has served with numerous organizations that promulgate modern poetry, such asthe National Federationof State Poetry Societies.

Swetman's poems, articles, short stories, and plays have appeared in hundreds of academic quarterlies, journals, and Sunday supplements including the Wisconsin Review, Film Quarterly, Ball State University Forum, Prairie Schooner, Kansas Quarterly, Quartet, Accent, Midwest Quarterly, Texas Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Trace (England), Oasis (England), A Semana (Brazil), Xavier University Press, (Bolivia), Poet (India), Tributes (Japan), Gryphon and Pteranodon. He is the author of 11 volumes of poetry. Swetman has appeared in several movies, is associated with the U.S. Army Intelligence, is an ecologist and a licensed alligator hunter.



 Check out Dr. Swetman's book, Poems of the Fantastic,

in our Book Mart section.

 

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