Thanks Jennifer. I worked a lot on getting the rhythm right - I wanted it to
be both lyrical and "broken"; I don't seek "perfect" lines, but something
else. If I speak it out loud, it works for me!
xA
On 4/27/07, Jennifer Compton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> well i really like this - it has narrative greed - and logic
>
> one picky thing to say - one line is just too long, the clump of glass
> line
> - maybe take the 'but' out
>
> a sad poem and a poem for the spirit of the times - just like watching TV
> these days
>
> cheers jen
>
> ----Original Message Follows----
> From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: "Poetryetc: poetry and poetics" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Ode
> Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 00:21:56 +1000
>
> Since everyone's posting poems, I'll post one too. I don't think I've
> posted
> it before...I wrote it a couple of months ago, and it's still my most
> recent
> poem. I only write poems these days when I can't prevent myself from doing
> so.
>
> xA
>
> Ode
>
>
> We were woken too early, before the moths had died in the streets,
> when buds had barely hardened in the frost, when stars are hurtful
> and famished. They took us through gardens and past the halls
> where once we had lingered, past the houses and doused markets.
> Our footsteps echoed back like iron. Of course we were frightened,
> that was a given, of course we remembered photographs we had studied
> that then had nothing to do with us. The empty light of morning
> made anything seem possible, even freedom, even God. We stumbled
> on familiar roads, and everything turned away from us,
> lamp-posts, windows, signs. They weren't ours any longer. Even the air
> greeted us differently, pinching our skin to wake us from its dreams.
>
>
> *
>
>
> Words of course were beyond us. They were what killed us
> to begin with. They were taken away from the mouths that loved them
> and given to men who worked their sorceries in distant cities,
> who said that difficult things were simple now and that simple things
> no longer existed. It was hard to find our way, we understood
> the tender magic of hands, we knew the magic of things not spoken,
> but this was a trick we couldn't grasp. It lifted the world in a clump of
> glass
> and when everything came back down the streets had vanished.
> In their places were shoes and clotting puddles and sparking wires
> and holes and bricks and other things that words have no words for
> and that silence swelling the noise until you can't hear anything at all.
>
>
> *
>
>
> It's said that the dead don't dream, but I dream of flowers.
> I could dream so many flowers – lilies like golden snow on water,
> hyacinths the colours of summer evenings or those amaranths they call
> love-lies-bleeding. I dream of none of those. I dream instead
> of wind-blown roses that grew in our shabby yard, of daisies
> glimpsed through the kitchen window, of marigolds that glowed
> through nets of weed. But most of all, I dream of red anemones
> that never grew in my garden. They rise on slender stalks,
> their seven-petalled heads bobbing and weaving in the wind.
> Wind-flowers, Pliny called them, because they open only in the wind,
> and the wind scatters their petals over every waste in the world.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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