International Poetry Competition
Grand Prize Winner: 2004
The Only Muntin Poem in the World
by Timothy Walsh
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Relax!
Home Pond
Yes, I’m pretty sure there are no others.
Perhaps in bygone times a carpenter
or master builder tried his hand at one,
but I don’t think so.
The truth is, no one knows what a muntin is
or what to call it when we point at one.
They are, in their way, so perfect—
that wooden framework that partitions off
the smaller panes of glass
in so many of our windows, old and new.
A muntin. That cross-
that waffle-
or look past, but never see.
There is a moral in this somewhere.
I could ask you to cogitate upon
the muntin-
how we partition off the vast, undifferentiated flux
in order to grasp it—
categorizing, sorting, labeling—
how language segments and pigeonholes
to gain a toehold on immensity….
Strange, isn’t it, how the mind overlays muntins
on everything we see, allowing us to think,
starting up that ever-
Is the mind, in fact, nothing but a vast muntin-
Millions of overlapping muntin grids, three dimensional,
muntins within muntins within muntins?
And yet there are still no sonnets on muntins,
no odes, sestinas, pantoums, or villanelles….
The next time you look out the window,
please notice the muntin and ask why
we must have four seasons, twelve months, twenty-
and why we must have muntins in our windows.
Poetry Contest