Free verse № 114450
Ending
Gravel road still bends its way,
old peach trees by its side,
dying now, those whips I planted,
for want of pruning, lack of care.
Silver maples around our house
still shade an overgrown yard.
But square depression marks the place
where basement was,
burned house above,
our songs, our bed,
pushed over limestone ledge
where once I sat and thought.
An overhanging rock my roof,
Flynn,s Creek my visionâs treat,
now buried with all those thoughts
beneath my houseâs bones.
It all held promise at his leaving.
Always it would come again,
Before I came and saw the end
With peach trees along the road.
I picked a wormy half-sized fruit
Bit and tasted a bitter reward.
23 comments
My choice may also merely be a masculine viewpoint.
Both pleased my palate, "errors" aside.
but I want the movie. 8 for now
was beautiful. out in the country, and going back brought back memories, and you became depressed. you thought about the good and the bad times. sometimes going back home gives you peace of mine and motivation. because memories or like true love, it's
always in your heart.
Itâs nice to taunt and tease, so there.
Howâs that for an unsupportable general statement.
AUSTRIAN: Your smell is practically unbearable.
AMERICAN: *Fart*
If you're bent on overloading your poems with unsupportable self-righteous assertions, why don't you do what any writer with sense would do and just insert a character into the poem to speak the self-righteous lines? That way your poem's not self-righteous, you're just describing some guy who might or might not be self-righteous (cf. any of the dozens of unsupportable statements in any of richa's poems.)
And while you're at it, why don't you try to not be so self-righteous? You're so proud of yourself and doubt-free in your poems it actually hurts.
Knowing your usual subtlety, I look for other meanings. Dan has posted far fewer poems in the last few months than I have, so your comment, âwrites loads of poems,â must refer to me. You could have said so. I accept that I have not learned much and therefore often find it easy to finish a poem and move on to the next one. I think I have improved through the process.
Thank you, and please feel as free as zodiac to speak directly. No, I take that back.
Here's mine for you: As usual, you're not answering the fucking point of my fucking comment.
Some poets write their first-person only as views they truly hold. Over time, they instill in their readers a picture of themselves which can become quite accurate. Sometimes I wish for that, but not often. I could be a dog, a democrat, myself, or a self-rightous prude. Everyone is self-righteous.
That aside (and probably utterly untrue and irrelevant - who knows?) the points of my earlier comment were that:
1) you answered richa's comment that your poems tend to make unsupportable assertions by making a bunch of unsupportable assertions and saying "so there";
2) a useful trick for making unsupportable assertions in a poem is to place a character in the poem who makes the assertions;
3) your poems are self-righteous and doubt-free.
The last bit, I'll admit now, was a little over the top. I'm sorry. But, seriously, I was thinking about the last poem of yours I'd read, "A Better God", and just kind of connecting it with a vague idea I've gotten about you from earlier poems. I might have better said, "You might consider being careful to make sure your poems don't sound self-righteous. The feeling I get from your poems of a rather childish and naive certainty, for me inseparable from the sense I get of you, Dovina, whether or not it's some elaborately constructed narrative voice, is actually painful to me." Better?
Anyways, your response was a general, unsupportable and laughably wrong attack on my person, having practically nothing to do with my comment. After reading it, I checked the last half-dozen times I'd made useful and practical suggestions on your poems, and saw you'd regularly ignored the point of my comments and just said something irrelevant or insulting. So I guess my saying, "As usual, you're not answering the fucking point of my fucking comment" isn't so far off the mark.
PS-You just think it's "childishly thought out" because I said "fucking" - twice.
Anyhoo my characterization of you didn't have anything to do with your narratorial voice or whatever the rest of your comment's on about. Good catch!!!
This doesn't have anything to do with "any views that I do not personally hold", or whatever. Actually, it's better for views you DO personally hold, but are for some reason or another unsupportable, self-righteous, or open to attack. With views you don't personally hold it's safer, since people will be inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and recognise crazy or ill-informed views as crazy and ill-informed. If you wrote a poem that went, for example,
Walking through Colour Town,
Down streets smelling of Chinamen,
Down streets smelling of Mexicans,
Down streets smelling of Blacks,
Down streets smelling of Jews,
I feel an unbearable ache
And wonder
Which street is yours?
- people will probably not really think you're a racist, but rather that you're making fun of racists. Am I wrong?
Sure you can put whatever the hell kind of view you want in the first person and make it a character narrating - or claim it is later - but it's a lot harder, and you don't need harder now. If that WERE the tack you wanted to take, I'd say you'd need to work to distance your persona - Dovina's - from the narrator's. An easy way to do that is to insert some doubt or flaw in the narrator's persona that the reader is unlikely to attribute to you, Dovina - because they'll think it's too honest even for Confessional Poetry (or whatever) or because it actually casts some doubt on your - Dovina's - real assertions. I mean like here:
http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.j
or here
http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.j
Anyway, it's just a suggestion. Considering that the moral certainty/whatever I've seen or imagined seeing in your poems recently is a terribly unhealthy thing for a real young lady to have, I hope you'll at least try it. Here are some decent examples:
http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.j
http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.j
http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.j
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