Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, by Julie Steiner

Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously.

(Noam Chomsky’s famous example of a nonsensical sentence with impeccable structure)

I don’t know what I’m looking at. I’ve seen
memorials before: train stations here
recall the Jews they caused to disappear
when I’m about to board the same machine.

This takes me nowhere, though. A wall of green
glass conducts me down to an austere
and claustrophobic courtyard, where I peer
at signage. What’s this place supposed to mean?

“Nine-Eleven.” What? Why here? That’s not
transparent, though this structure’s steel-webbed glass
and giant letter-slot let daylight pass.

The rusty beam they crucify is caught
in time, but cockeyed. 2-D towers rise
to form an open book that mocks my why's.

Julie Steiner

after Memoria e luce: 9/11 Memorial in Padua, by  Daniel Libeskind (USA, b. Poland) 2005.

photo by Andrea Osti. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego, California. Her poetry has appeared in Literary Matters, The New Verse News, The Able Muse Review, Rattle, Light, The Asses of Parnassus, and American Arts Quarterly, among other venues. She recently embarked on her third decade as an active participant in the Eratosphere online poetry workshop (www.ablemuse.com/erato).