Were
Purest verb of wistful longing: I wish it were Friday. I wish you were here.
Yesterday we were studying and we were studying yesterday.
Were and wer are archaic terms for adult male humans in Germanic cultures, often used alliteratively as in “were and wife.”
Therianthropy is a fancy name for shapeshifting. If you were less shifty, you and I could be the best of friends.
Second person singular past, plural past, and past subjunctive of “be.” What if we were more like bees? Seeking frequent flowers? Part of a hive?
Pretty sure that people who say “I told you so” want to make you at least a little bit mad, so my favorite reply is a calm, “You were right.”
I can’t stand musicals, but “If I Were a Rich Man” is a catchy tune.
Were you being serious when you asked if I was being serious? If I were you, I’d be more careful.
If I were a rich man, though, I think the man part would have more of an impact on my day-to-day existence. Maybe that’s why I consider myself a feminist Marxist, not a Marxist feminist.
Were you there when the golden hour set the magnolia blossoms afire?
In the 1700s, if you were a man, you’d have your portrait painted with a paunch because that meant fortune, high office, derring-do. Those were the days, I guess.
If you were to listen hard enough, you could hear spiderwebs in the forest, harps hung up by hopeful arachnids—a soft and constant rustle of bells.
What if you were to abandon the arbitrariness of the human perspective?
Werewolf, werebear, werecat, wererat. Were it possible to express a preference, I’d like to be a weredolphin.
“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death,” said Wittgenstein (long-dead). “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” If he were just to have said Be here now or whatever, it’d be less impressive.
What if I were to be more direct? Would it change anything?
What if you were simply to give me I want? (I said that to the universe.)
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in Fall of 2022 by Texas Review Press and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in Fall of 2023. She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.
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Heavy Feather Review 