If Monday’s poem by Rhina Espaillat celebrated “the godmother of the New Formalism,” today’s selection in The Sun’s showcase of living poets demonstrates that rhyme and meter remain a poetic lingua franca for a new generation. Boston native Andrew Frisardi, who currently resides in Italy, is a poet, critic, and translator, whose works include a book of poems, “The Harvest and the Lamp,” an annotated translation of Dante’s “Convivio,” and a critical study, “Love’s Scribe: Reading Dante in the Book of Creation.” Today’s nine-line iambic-pentameter poem, with its braided rhymes, meditates with compressed potency on a fleeting instant of innocent family happiness.   

Family Snapshot 
by Andrew Frisardi 

for my brother 

We’re shapes suspended in the tinted grains, 
Making faces on our parents’ laps. 
The four of us are happy: Christmas Eve 
On Hawthorne Street. Our troubles mere mishaps, 
We’re blind to what might be up Fortune’s sleeve. 
We smile at cheese, having no cause to fret 
About the night behind us in the panes. 

A flash. The years, like light that’s fading, lapse. 
We’re looking into eyes we don’t know yet. 

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.