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Ending (Free verse) by Dovina 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.
Up the ladder:
R.I.P (Epitaphs)
Down the ladder:
The Right Call
Votes: (green: user, blue: anonymous)
Arithmetic Mean: 7.428571
Posted: October 28, 2004 12:54 PM PDT; Last modified: October 28, 2004 12:54 PM PDTWeighted score: 5.6531434 Overall Rank: 2107 Comments:
Very vivid images. Well written but could use a stanza dedicated to the beauty of what the place was, for the sake of contrast. Right now it's more depressing than tragic. This poem should be bigger. I feel there's a great story in there. Right now it's a great photograph
but I want the movie. 8 for now
I could make it not just bigger, but overwhelming, or boring. Itâs hard to be entangled in a memory and say anything coherent about it. Thanks. âMore depressing than tragic,â yes, maybe because my going there, seeing the remains, closed a door that had remained ajar for years after any possibility of entry had departed.
Very well written -10-
Thank you, but I do love to know why.
There's nothing like the beauty of memories. I imagine this place
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.
Thank you, it was a beautiful place in the country, and now itâs only a memory. Returning to the ruin was the ending of possibilities, not a depression really, but the final knowledge that that memory is a memory, and nothing else.
This is the best of yours I have read. It leads the reader with its images rather than making general statements which it can't support (your biggest weakness in other poems). Pinon planter was good as well. You can not have a -10- because I don't give -10-'s. Have a -9-
Itâs nice to lead and please, so thanks.
Itâs nice to taunt and tease, so there. Howâs that for an unsupportable general statement.
You're not answering richa's point, which is a decent one. Or your answering it in a singularly American fashion - something like the following conversation I recently heard between an American tourist and an Austrian:
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.
Zody is grumpy today and tries to cause a ruckus. Heâs like the rider of a loud Harley, enjoying his noise and the irritation all around him.
Contentedness is quite unattractive to poets. It seems the more you learn the harder it is to actually finish a poem. Then someone like Dan garcia Black, who doesn't know much and hence writes loads of poems, claims that the only thing that seperates him from a good poet is that a good poet has a thesaurus. The good poet does have a thesaurus. He wants to smack Dan garcia-Black over the head with it.
This is a strange comment, because of where you posted it. Dan has his mailboxes, why donât you use them? You probably refer his Hollywood Shoeshine Boy, and your interpretation is too simplistic.
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.
The comment was a general one on why insipid criticism between parties complimenting themselves is an anathema to many. It is a subtle distinction but I said Dan knows little therefore can write loads of poems. I did not say those who write loads of poems know little. A pinon planter was a good poem. Since then you have had a few sketchy ones which you have been reinforced for by Dan. Dan is a guy who believes those seen as good poets are the same as him but with a thesaurus. Dan is not your friend. We are. As for misinterpreting Hollywood shoe-shiner. His poem was written in about two minutes and the reason it could be is because the only criteria it sought to satisfy was to make the message 'earnest poets use thesauri and it don't matter I'm uneducated' rhyme.
Hey, ace characterization! And right on the nose, too!
Here's mine for you: As usual, you're not answering the fucking point of my fucking comment.
Your characterization of me is childishly thought out. How do you know that the "I" in any of my poems is me talking, self-rightously as you accuse? I wrote a poem recently (maybe I'll post it) called My Wife, which tells of her insensitivity to a man's needs. As a married may, you may find my manly views either ace or dim, maybe self righteous. In another poem I said that I think heaven is a good expectation. You miss the point of the show-verses-tell arguement that keeps repeating here on Poemranker. A poem written in the first person often states a position, but not necessarily that of the poet. You tell me to put any views that I do not personally hold into the mouth of a "character." What if I do, and what if I don't? As near as I see, this simplistic evaluation of my work is all thay you have said. In case you're wondering, I write a silly poem once in a while because it's fun.
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.
How do you know the "you" in my comments was really you - Dovina - and not a purely rhetorical "you", maybe even a character I've created named "you", to whom, in the interest of indirectness and otherwise poetickal abstractness I direct all my comments?
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!!!
Now that you are actually talking about voices/whatever, here goes: In the poems of yours I've read recently, I don't get the impression you're creating some narrating character. Call me blind, but I HAVE spent the last seven years (ie, longer than you've been out of middle school) talking about narrating voices, so I guess I ought to know as well as anyone. Regardless, a neat trick to say something which could be read as self-righteousness is to obviously place a character in the poem to say it. That's all.
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
Again, I wonder why you spend so much time on these comments. Your points could have been stated with 10% of the words, or Iâm missing something. Yes, I will take your suggestion of using characters sometimes to say the unsupportable stuff. Yes, I tell more and show less than most readers like, and maybe Iâll decide someday to conform to their wishes. Yes, I state my personal views in some of my poems. Btw, I like poems that contain real feelings that strike chords of resonance within me. And yes, that is an unsupportable attitude.
The statement "I like X" is not unsupportable.
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My choice may also merely be a masculine viewpoint.
Both pleased my palate, "errors" aside.