Hi Mike
(& all else who’re reading - horticulturally or not!)
I think all this about the orchid is interesting – but isn’t getting to the
problem I have with the poem…
I’m feeling more disappointed by how the poem ends. These wet feet in this
grass! If one picture’s symbolic then what do I make of this other and
“nah…” I’m not impressed… (It both feels like a line slotted on to end the
poem, yet it feels as if I ought to be getting something more than: "Oh yes,
this is where real orchids - not metaphorical orchids - grow!")
It might be that the piece gets itself filed away and something re-emerges
in years to come in just a line in another poem – a line like: “he/she
dreams of orchids then wakes” or “The sun rises. An orchid blossoms. He
wakes.” may not reveal the writing history behind its deployment but who
cares?
Bob
who’s got, and used, often with amazing results, lines and images from poems
that would never have swum for any shore - or blossomed from a garden's
belly - on their own.
And who’s just read (in a newspaper article someone’s handed to him today)
that Tony Harrison’s got a whole room in his house in Newcastle full of
notebooks with jottings of not-yet-poems!
> > > At Dawn
> > >
> > > I never wanted this, the heart pumping,
> > > blood punishing the veins in thin wrists.
> > >
> > > The skin below my ribs parts and tears
> > > and the orchid pushes its silky stem
> > > at the wound´s livid lips,
> > > stretching flaps of flesh
> > > into a red-raw O.
> > >
> > > Orchis raises his headbud,
> > > dislodging cells like grains of soil,
> > > rippling my belly and I cannot look
> > > away, though the starting day lights
> > > the vegetable world outside my window
> > > and streaks the dawn sky.
> > >
> > > Could I rise and step out, barefoot,
> > > on the cool grass beneath the trees?
> > >
> > > I lie back on my pillow in single
> > > contemplation of the orchid blooming
> > > below my heart, streaked purple and yellow,
> > > lurid as any sky at dawn
> > > and imagine the feel of cool grass on bare feet.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Mike
> > >
> >
_________________________________________________________________
It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today!
http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger
|