Hello Colin,
Nice and gruesome, isn´t it? I agree with some other comments that this would benefit from judicious cutting. I noticed that in one of your comments on another poem you referred to Weldon Kees. This one strikes me as being thematically very Kees-like. I mean the rotting corpse that is lying at the end of everyone´s garden, the one which the examination of dental records will reveal to be our own. Was that your intention? It´s a nice idea. That´s an odd way to describe it, what I mean is that I think it can make a good poem with a bit of reworking.
Best wishes, Mike
--- Alkuperäinen viesti ---
It Was Not Easy to Ignore the Stench
It was not easy to ignore the mephitic stench
as it wafted across the lawn-
the unmistakable smell of rotting flesh-
guessed at corpse of cat or dog
hidden in undergrowth.
We hoped to dig it out and move it on,
but the summer tangle was too dense -
not stick nor spade could find the putrid place.
Flies buzzed and assailed our senses,
lay like eyes on the bushes,
but never showed the way.
So we turned back
to the short grass of the lawn,
buried our faces in roses,
made jokes about the smell.
Someone said it must be a dead rabbit
and someone else that it could be a mouse.
We only talked of crawling under bushes
all the way to the hedge,
explored without success,
expressed bewilderment
and said that the smell was declining,
that whatever it was
the maggots and sextons would have it soon.
We drank orange juice
and talked of other things all summer,
played with the baby as it learnt to crawl,
remarked that the flowers this year
were better than ever before.
What might have lain there
we knew only in dreams,
in the lingering dread of days gone by.
We tried to forget the foetid wind
pressing the glass at night,
the peeling paint at the window's edge.
We never looked beyond the hedge
till one more curious than the rest
ventured and found at last
what none had ever wished to find,
the tattered clothes and ribs that would not disappear,
organs liquefying into the ground,
a skull exposed in parts with grinning teeth,
the remains of a face, missing for half a year.
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Title?
Colin
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