Four words in, the grammar of Jim Leftwich's «Antithesis 56» has already tipped over. "Are death we" is a sentence read backwards: the natural order would be "we are death," and the poem hands it over with its pieces rearranged. The shift matters. "We are death" does not say that we will die or that we fear dying. It says we are made of the thing itself, which is stranger and more unsettling. Then comes "awe," alone on its own line, a single word with a gap above it and a gap below. It can be a noun, the feeling we are left with, or a verb, so that "we awe" means we inspire it or feel it. The poem never chooses. It also sits close in sound to "are," a vowel apart, so the two words feel like one breath bent in two.
The second stanza reads like an attempt to say something complete. "Hard to be / a true turning / of the wind / inside-out" at least looks like a sentence, though it has no subject. Who finds it hard, and what exactly is hard to be? The poem leaves the "it" missing and lets the difficulty hang there. What follows is a startling image. We know the picture of wind turning an umbrella inside-out, but here the wind itself is turned inside-out. Wind has no inside, so the image is a paradox, a movement that folds in on itself and cannot be pictured and yet can almost be felt.
Two of the words carry extra weight. "Turning" is close to the root of the word "verse," which comes from the Latin for turning (*versus*, from *vertere*), so a poem is in a sense a "turning" by definition. "True" can mean honest, but it also has the craftsman's sense of something properly aligned, like a true wheel. Being "a true turning" might mean being a real change, a real poem, a real reversal. The poem says that this is hard, and its own broken syntax shows why. The title also helps. "Antithesis" means setting one thing against another, and the number suggests, judging by the title alone, that this is one piece in a longer sequence.
The pull between the two stanzas may be the antithesis the title promises. In the first, death is fixed, something we are. In the second, the wind is endless motion. Awe sits between them as the only response either one allows. Read this way, being "a true turning" is hard because, as the first stanza says, we are bound up with what does not turn. This is an interpretation, though, and the poem gives very little to hold it down.
The form supports that openness. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are breath-sized: three syllables, four, three, three. The sound is heavy where it counts. "Hard," "death," "to," "true" and "turning" all lean on hard consonants, while the "w" sounds in "we" and "wind" give the poem a soft, airy thread. The word "wind" is also a trap, since read as a verb (to wind, rhyming with "find") it becomes another kind of turning. Everything is lowercase and there is no punctuation, so no full stop ever closes a thought. The one hyphen, in "inside-out," is the only place where two words are physically joined, and it falls on the poem's last image, so the poem ends on a join.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it explains and how much it does. It tells us that turning is hard, and its first line has already been turned inside-out in front of us. The meaning cannot be reached by paraphrase, because the gaps are part of it. A reader has to supply the missing subject, decide whether "awe" is a verb or a noun, and picture a wind with an inside. Nothing is said about the poet or the poem's origins here, since the text gives no basis for it, but the poem needs none. It is short enough to read in seconds and strange enough to keep returning to.