The robot camera enters the Titanic
And we see her fish-cold nurseries on the news;
The toys of Pompeii trampled in the panic;
The death camp barrel of baby shoes;
–
The snow that covered up the lost girl’s tracks;
The scapular she wore about her neck;
The broken doll the photojournalist packs
To toss into the foreground of the wreck.
This poem by Michael Donaghy, ‘Reliquary’, is now more pertinent than Donaghy could have ever imagined. I think the poem is about how we unwittingly or wittingly insert ourselves into the past – how we excavate to incavate. In a volta’s fire, “The broken doll the photojournalist packs / To toss into the foreground of the wreck” is woven into the perfect alternate rhyme structure of the poem itself, as we unknowingly are the wreck we claim the vanity of having distance from. What is historical becomes actual.
The title is bathed in irony – the line ‘The death camp barrel of baby shoes’, with its invented and disturbing concept of baby saints, does not quite step into regular pentameter: we ourselves are on the same awkward, jittery journey, reading this poem, re-re-reading about the Titanic, hearing that a submersible has imploded, re-martyred.
Squidditas 
A poet of my acquaintance (some years back) used to be a dab hand at sonnets, wrote scores of them, co-edited a sonnet magazine and an anthology. Regarding iambic pentameter, she told me “It’s a ripple, not a jackhammer-blow.”
The poem above uses an iambic frame, but not a strict one, some lines end with an unstressed syllable, some feet only work if you slur or swallow a (relatively unimportant?) syllable as in “nurs’ries” or “barr’l” or “journ’list,” some lines don’t even have five feet. The big question is does this make it a bad poem? No. In fact this untidiness adds to its urgency, its feeling of immediacy. It’s a poem of its moment…
This is the moment I remember I’m talking to a poet. Forgive me!
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I didn’t know that quote, which I like, a lot. And I am talking also to a poet!
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