[Stephen] Fry, who’s known in Britain as a novelist, comedian, commentator and all-around interesting dude (and in America as the guy who sometimes collaborates with the guy from “House”), has written a book with the cheerfully awful title “The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within” that purports to teach us “how to have fun with the modes and forms of poetry as they have developed over the years.” Or to put it another way, this is J. Evans-Pritchard [from Dead Poets Society] as rewritten by the man who played the sublimely obtuse General Melchett in the “Blackadder” series; which is to say, this is something very odd indeed.Read the whole review here.
It’s also oddly effective. “The Ode Less Travelled” is at once idiosyncratic and thoroughly traditional — it’s filled with quips, quirks and various Fry-isms (sestinas are “a bitch to explain but a joy to make”), yet still manages to be a smart, comprehensive guide to prosody. It’s organized in three main sections — meter, rhyme and form, with exercises suggested for each — and a smaller concluding section in which Fry gives some general thoughts about contemporary British poetry. It also has a practical, good-natured glossary (a choliamb is a “kind of metrical substitution, usually with ternary feet replacing binary. Forget about it.”) The key to the book’s success is its tone, which is joking, occasionally fussy, sometimes distractingly cute, but always approachable. If Fry thinks the meter of a Keats couplet doesn’t work, he’ll tell you so, and he’s more than happy to admit his own effort at a ghazal is “rather a bastardly abortion.” As is to be expected in any book taking on such a complicated subject, there are a few minor errors. For instance, in a discussion of hendecasyllabic (11-syllable) lines, Fry includes Frost’s “And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver.” (Unlike Fry, Frost is American, and would have pronounced “flower” with two syllables.) But such mistakes are negligible. On the whole, the book is ideal for anyone who’s interested in learning more about poetic forms but doesn’t have an obsessive assistant professor living next door.
THE ODE LESS TRAVELLED
Unlocking the Poet Within.
By Stephen Fry.
Gotham. $25.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Review: THE ODE LESS TRAVELLED by Stephen Fry
The New York Times Book Review takes a look at Stephen Fry's attempt to make poetry fun and accessible to the masses. This is no east task, as any poetry teacher could tell you.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Two Photos: Nasser Majali
"Mini Market in the Bekaa"
"Finished Discussion"
~ Nasser Majali is 26 years old and lives in Jordan. You can view more of his work at his homepage.
Poem: Tim J Brennan
the other night
you were talking
from across the room
i was listening,
i swear, but observed
instead, your bare wrist
extended, holding
that lovely right hand
at that exact moment
you became the oil
painting i’ve always wished
to perch before in a quiet place,
pondering its purpose
you could have been speaking
about tomorrow’s dinner or
the unopened rye bread
on our white kitchen linen
instead, i saw only
the symmetry
sometimes words
are not necessary
only my time lacks
understanding as to
what it all means
you were talking
from across the room
i was listening,
i swear, but observed
instead, your bare wrist
extended, holding
that lovely right hand
at that exact moment
you became the oil
painting i’ve always wished
to perch before in a quiet place,
pondering its purpose
you could have been speaking
about tomorrow’s dinner or
the unopened rye bread
on our white kitchen linen
instead, i saw only
the symmetry
sometimes words
are not necessary
only my time lacks
understanding as to
what it all means
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Poem: Bill Hotchkiss
I am extremely honored to be able to post some poems from my early teacher, mentor, and good friend, Bill Hotchkiss. This poem, and those that I will be posting in the coming weeks, are from a new manuscript, The Grave Witnesses: Poems 1980-1992 (forthcoming). Bill lives part of the year in Williams, Oregon, where I grew up and where he will be retiring after this school year.
OAK RUN CREEK
AT DUSK we drive to the canyon bottom,
Where a half-grown porcupine, not expecting us,
Outraged by our presence, scuttles up a bank —
He bristles, dull claws
Dig at dusty red earth and stones.
We park at an abandoned log landing, get out.
I find yellow and red shotgun shell casings
Scattered, a piece of crumpled metal
With holes in it, target for twenty-two practice.
A bridge across the creek, logs
With overlay of packed dirt, nearly
Washed out — what remains will accommodate
Foot traffic, one at a time, no more.
We cross. On the other side of Oak Run Creek,
The road unused for the past year.
We walk quickly downstream, hurry
In day’s last hour of light. The creek
Is noisy in the draw, hidden by wild grapevines
And maples and young Douglas firs, flow sourced
From springs, water bubbling from under caprock lava
At the foot of Green Mountain and Clover Mountain,
Peaks that were also mountains of fire
A few thousand years back, just north
Of the Tehama upthrust and Mt. Lassen’s cone.
Mule deer crash through brush, vault themselves
Up canyonside. One stops in shadows,
Stares back at us — big doe, half-hidden
Now by a thicket of young oaks.
Bats dart in twilight, creekwater
Hisses through a litter of black stones.
Oak, maple, pine, fir, dry grass, musky flowering weeds,
Some odor Lilith and I both associate with childhood.
Half a mile down we stop, decide to return —
The light’s rapidly failing. I stare
Upward at pale violet sky,
Visible between dark walls of conifers,
Detect three stars. I gaze at an arbitrary point
Of open space — waiting for glow
Of another star to appear, as I know one must.
First a glimmer, then pulsation, then a far sun,
Exactly where I’ve been staring. “Of course,”
I think, and wonder why I’ve never played this
Precise game before, not ever.
The creek continues to hiss among stones, the trail back
To where we left our rig hardly visible in vanishing light.
Sky ravished with stars as we cross
The partly-washed-out bridge that links dream
And consciousness, though I’m not sure which is which:
We open the doors to our truck, get in.
OAK RUN CREEK
AT DUSK we drive to the canyon bottom,
Where a half-grown porcupine, not expecting us,
Outraged by our presence, scuttles up a bank —
He bristles, dull claws
Dig at dusty red earth and stones.
We park at an abandoned log landing, get out.
I find yellow and red shotgun shell casings
Scattered, a piece of crumpled metal
With holes in it, target for twenty-two practice.
A bridge across the creek, logs
With overlay of packed dirt, nearly
Washed out — what remains will accommodate
Foot traffic, one at a time, no more.
We cross. On the other side of Oak Run Creek,
The road unused for the past year.
We walk quickly downstream, hurry
In day’s last hour of light. The creek
Is noisy in the draw, hidden by wild grapevines
And maples and young Douglas firs, flow sourced
From springs, water bubbling from under caprock lava
At the foot of Green Mountain and Clover Mountain,
Peaks that were also mountains of fire
A few thousand years back, just north
Of the Tehama upthrust and Mt. Lassen’s cone.
Mule deer crash through brush, vault themselves
Up canyonside. One stops in shadows,
Stares back at us — big doe, half-hidden
Now by a thicket of young oaks.
Bats dart in twilight, creekwater
Hisses through a litter of black stones.
Oak, maple, pine, fir, dry grass, musky flowering weeds,
Some odor Lilith and I both associate with childhood.
Half a mile down we stop, decide to return —
The light’s rapidly failing. I stare
Upward at pale violet sky,
Visible between dark walls of conifers,
Detect three stars. I gaze at an arbitrary point
Of open space — waiting for glow
Of another star to appear, as I know one must.
First a glimmer, then pulsation, then a far sun,
Exactly where I’ve been staring. “Of course,”
I think, and wonder why I’ve never played this
Precise game before, not ever.
The creek continues to hiss among stones, the trail back
To where we left our rig hardly visible in vanishing light.
Sky ravished with stars as we cross
The partly-washed-out bridge that links dream
And consciousness, though I’m not sure which is which:
We open the doors to our truck, get in.
Two Photos: Daniel Caldararu
"Alone Butterfly"
"Mirror to the Soul"
~ Daniel Caldararu is 16 years old and lives in Romania. You can see more of his work at his homepage.
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Charles Wright's New Collection of Poems
Charles Wright is one of America's finest poets. He has spent his career searching the space between belief and doubt and recording what he finds there. His work sometimes has the feel of a struggle with the unbearable weight of being pushing against the realization that everything is exactly as it should be. You can also find more than a little Buddhism mixed into his agnostic Christianity.
From The New York Times Book Review:
Read the rest.
From The New York Times Book Review:
A World in Permanent Flux
By JOEL BROUWER
Published: September 17, 2006
Wallace Stevens said “it must be abstract,” William Carlos Williams said “no ideas but in things,” and Charles Wright, even after writing poems for more than 30 years, still can’t decide. Tennessean by birth, Virginian by longtime residence, languid by literary temperament, Wright has written more than a dozen books of poems, including a meditative and elegiac trio of trilogies he’s referred to as “The Appalachian Book of the Dead,” one volume of which, “Black Zodiac” (1997) won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. In the musing, sinuous poems of “Scar Tissue,” his new collection, as in much of his earlier work, Wright sometimes seems to prize the imagination above all else, describing “the absence the two / horses have left on the bare slope, / The silence that grazes like two shapes where they have been” as if the idea of horses were more important to him than the animals themselves. (Even this poem’s title, “Against the American Grain,” advertises its antipathy toward Williams, author of “In the American Grain.”) But elsewhere Wright seems to place far greater faith in things than in their representations (“A thing is not an image, / imagination’s second best”) and to mock the notion that the abstract imagination could ever be preferable to the physical world’s adamant particulars. After all, “How many word-warriors ever return / from midnight’s waste and ruin?” It’s not the transcendent that persists, but the lowly actual: “Whatever is insignificant has its own strength, / Whatever is hidden, clear vision. / Thus the ant in its hide-and-seek, / thus the dung beetle, / And all the past weight of the world it packs on its back.”
Tim Robinson
SCAR TISSUE
By Charles Wright. 73 pp.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.
Read the rest.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Two Photos: John Craig
untitled image
untitled image
~ John Craig is a professional photographer and creator of the blog Craig Photography. These images are from his public flickr site.
Birth of a Poet: Third Meditation
[Please see First Meditation and Second Meditation before reading this, the third installment.]
Meditation III: Creating Roots in Cyclical Time
Much of what we think of as the "search for the sacred" is an attempt to find our grounding in cyclical time. Human beings crave a grounding that allows us to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. For many, the church--in its various forms--fills this need. Through the ritual of communion and fellowship with other churchgoers, we feel part of something meaningful. For a few hours, our unique identity is subsumed into a larger identity--Christ's congregation.
For Buddhists, there is a similar process. When one commits to the Buddhist path, we take refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma, and in the Sangha. The sangha is the fellowship of other Buddhists, which is most often experienced as the group with whom we study or practice meditation.
However we seek this feeling of grounding, it is a basic need.
In premodern cultures, initiation provided the grounding in sacred space and time that allowed a young person to become a full member of the community. We have long ago abandoned any authentic form of initiation and replaced it with shallow and meaningless imitations. It's no wonder individuals in our culture often experience an overwhelming sense of ennui, not to mention full-blown depression.
I am not advocating a regression into a tribal worldview. What I am suggesting is that a healthy, integral consciousness will have a healthy connection to tribal-magical thinking that allows the individual to feel part of community, both at the interpersonal level of family and in the larger level of tribe, culture, or humanity. In the course of our evolution into the higher levels of development, we seem to have relegated aspects of the lower levels into our personal and collective shadows. Initiation is one of the things we have discarded in our rush into a rational understanding of our world and ourselves. We need to reclaim this vital tool from the trash heap of history.
Initiation follows a very simple pattern, no matter where in the world it occurs. As first identified by Arnold van Gennep in 1909, all ritual conforms to a basic underlying structure: separation, margin (or limen, meaning threshold in Latin), and reaggregation (more simply, return). Victor Turner, who has written the definitive statement on this topic, defines the transformation of states through the ritual as movement from one “stable or recurrent condition that is culturally recognized” to another.
The first stage (separation) involves symbolic behaviors representing the severing of ties to the “old” state of being, and with it all the cultural definitions and expectations that accrued to that particular state. In cultures that celebrate puberty rites, this separation may include removal from the family of origin, stripping of clothing, stripping of name, painting the face or body, shaving of hair, and other techniques that symbolically sever ties to the previous identity of the young person. In our modern world, we no longer celebrate puberty rites (the Jewish traditions of bar mitzvah and bas mitzvah are an exception, but only barely), but young boys and girls still find ways to mark the transition, including the move to middle school, the first date, sharing of “skin mags” among boys or makeup among girls, and other attempts to try on “adult” behaviors. The lack of adequate ways of helping young people make the transition from child to young adult has resulted in the proliferation of gangs and in books like Robert Bly’s Iron John, among other things.
The process of separation is common for adults, yet there is little training in how to deal with the situation when it arises. One may leave a relationship, a job, a city, and so on, all of which are often conscious choices and less traumatic than forced transitions. But what about the person who is fired, "dumped" by a partner, loses a parent, partner, or child to death, or in some other way is rejected and forced out of an established identity and way of life? There is no structure or training for coping with these events. One is often told to “get back on the horse,” “they’re in a better place,” “time heals all wounds,” “you’ll find something better,” and so on. These attempts to comfort are futile at best, and are often experienced as insulting to the pain one is experiencing.
When a person experiences some form of separation scenario, either consciously or against his/her will, the individual has become marginalized, existing in liminal space (“betwixt and between,” as Turner described it). During the liminal period, the individual is without strict identity, possessing none of the attributes of his/her former life and none of those s/he will have earned upon completion of the transition. In many cultures, entry into liminal space is a symbolic death, and may even involve ritual burial, change of name, or a permanent separation from the family of origin. According to Turner [in Betwixt and Between, edited by Mahdi, Foster, and Little (1987)], "transitional beings,” while in liminal space, have “no status, property, insignia, secular clothing, rank, kinship position, nothing to demarcate them structurally” from the others who are undertaking the initiation. A modern individual experiencing liminality isn’t completely stripped of all vestiges of her/his life in this drastic way, but the reality is still quite challenging for most people.
In the industrialized, and now post-industrial world, human beings have much more highly developed ego structures than the members of premodern cultures studied by van Gennep and Turner, among others. With greater ego development comes a greater sense of personal identity and a greater need to keep the self-sense intact. The ego can create a variety of defenses (Freud made his career, in part, by identifying the ego’s defense mechanisms and finding ways to circumvent them) in order to keep identity intact. Liminality brought on by a major life event, or even by unconscious processes in the psyche, has a tendency to poke holes in the self-concept and to reduce the solidity of one’s self-sense.
I propose that we seek out opportunities to "come undone." Coming undone is the way I describe those times in our lives when events or our own choices work to break up stagnant and solidified elements of self-identity. The fundamental element that makes possible any form of change is a reduction in ego defense mechanisms. Traumatic life events serve this purpose but can also plunge us into depths of liminality that we may not be capable of handling on our own. Ritualized initiation can serve this same purpose in a controlled manner. When we emerge from the initiation experience, if it has been given the weight it deserves, we will feel transformed.
The final stage, the return, marks the re-entry of the individual into the tribe, the group, or the culture as a new person. The individual assumes the new identity and adopts behaviors consistent with the new role. A boy having completed a puberty rite may now be given a new name, signifying his adulthood, a weapon with which to hunt, a hut in which to live, and so on. He is now a man in the eyes of the group, though he may still have years of training and future initiations to undertake before he is permitted to take a wife, hunt on his own, and be given other rights by the group.
When a Western person completes a transitional period, the individual may make certain changes in how s/he is perceived by the world, including clothing, occupation, name, and other “structural” changes, while also adopting less obvious traits such a new perspective, greater depth of identity, more comfort with ambiguity, less rigid thinking, and so on. Because transitions are not socially acknowledged in the West, there are no agreed upon ways to act following a major transition, or ways to regard someone who has completed a transitional period. Even the “ritual” of a hospital stay following an operation or serious illness has been eliminated by the HMO and managed health care systems. The only real tradition still intact for modern human beings having completed an important life transition is the honeymoon, and even that is a waning tradition.
Separation / Initiation / Return. The three stages of ritual and also the structure of the monomyth. Everyone must go through this in one way or another. Until we do--through the death of a parent or a friend, the loss of a significant relationship, being fired from a job, or any other form of change, including those we choose--our identity will not be fully formed. It may take several traumatic events to move us toward our true nature. Some people never take the hint and reject every call for transformation.
We must learn to recognize the rupture, the break in plane, when it occurs and to see it for what it is--spiritual initiation. It is the rupturing of linear time and an entry into cyclical time, sacred time. The threshold is the mystery, the risk, the threat. But we can seek it out, befriend it, and learn its secrets. We can cultivate surrender as an active principle. We can sink roots into cyclical time so that no matter how challenged we are in the linear world, we will have a grounding, a connection. We can activate the tribal level in our consciousness and experience the world as an interconnected mystery, a sacred place. This is not regression, but becoming more whole.
[Some of the material in this post is from a manuscript in progress, The Structures of Change.]
Meditation III: Creating Roots in Cyclical Time
Much of what we think of as the "search for the sacred" is an attempt to find our grounding in cyclical time. Human beings crave a grounding that allows us to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. For many, the church--in its various forms--fills this need. Through the ritual of communion and fellowship with other churchgoers, we feel part of something meaningful. For a few hours, our unique identity is subsumed into a larger identity--Christ's congregation.
For Buddhists, there is a similar process. When one commits to the Buddhist path, we take refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma, and in the Sangha. The sangha is the fellowship of other Buddhists, which is most often experienced as the group with whom we study or practice meditation.
However we seek this feeling of grounding, it is a basic need.
In premodern cultures, initiation provided the grounding in sacred space and time that allowed a young person to become a full member of the community. We have long ago abandoned any authentic form of initiation and replaced it with shallow and meaningless imitations. It's no wonder individuals in our culture often experience an overwhelming sense of ennui, not to mention full-blown depression.
I am not advocating a regression into a tribal worldview. What I am suggesting is that a healthy, integral consciousness will have a healthy connection to tribal-magical thinking that allows the individual to feel part of community, both at the interpersonal level of family and in the larger level of tribe, culture, or humanity. In the course of our evolution into the higher levels of development, we seem to have relegated aspects of the lower levels into our personal and collective shadows. Initiation is one of the things we have discarded in our rush into a rational understanding of our world and ourselves. We need to reclaim this vital tool from the trash heap of history.
Initiation follows a very simple pattern, no matter where in the world it occurs. As first identified by Arnold van Gennep in 1909, all ritual conforms to a basic underlying structure: separation, margin (or limen, meaning threshold in Latin), and reaggregation (more simply, return). Victor Turner, who has written the definitive statement on this topic, defines the transformation of states through the ritual as movement from one “stable or recurrent condition that is culturally recognized” to another.
The first stage (separation) involves symbolic behaviors representing the severing of ties to the “old” state of being, and with it all the cultural definitions and expectations that accrued to that particular state. In cultures that celebrate puberty rites, this separation may include removal from the family of origin, stripping of clothing, stripping of name, painting the face or body, shaving of hair, and other techniques that symbolically sever ties to the previous identity of the young person. In our modern world, we no longer celebrate puberty rites (the Jewish traditions of bar mitzvah and bas mitzvah are an exception, but only barely), but young boys and girls still find ways to mark the transition, including the move to middle school, the first date, sharing of “skin mags” among boys or makeup among girls, and other attempts to try on “adult” behaviors. The lack of adequate ways of helping young people make the transition from child to young adult has resulted in the proliferation of gangs and in books like Robert Bly’s Iron John, among other things.
The process of separation is common for adults, yet there is little training in how to deal with the situation when it arises. One may leave a relationship, a job, a city, and so on, all of which are often conscious choices and less traumatic than forced transitions. But what about the person who is fired, "dumped" by a partner, loses a parent, partner, or child to death, or in some other way is rejected and forced out of an established identity and way of life? There is no structure or training for coping with these events. One is often told to “get back on the horse,” “they’re in a better place,” “time heals all wounds,” “you’ll find something better,” and so on. These attempts to comfort are futile at best, and are often experienced as insulting to the pain one is experiencing.
When a person experiences some form of separation scenario, either consciously or against his/her will, the individual has become marginalized, existing in liminal space (“betwixt and between,” as Turner described it). During the liminal period, the individual is without strict identity, possessing none of the attributes of his/her former life and none of those s/he will have earned upon completion of the transition. In many cultures, entry into liminal space is a symbolic death, and may even involve ritual burial, change of name, or a permanent separation from the family of origin. According to Turner [in Betwixt and Between, edited by Mahdi, Foster, and Little (1987)], "transitional beings,” while in liminal space, have “no status, property, insignia, secular clothing, rank, kinship position, nothing to demarcate them structurally” from the others who are undertaking the initiation. A modern individual experiencing liminality isn’t completely stripped of all vestiges of her/his life in this drastic way, but the reality is still quite challenging for most people.
In the industrialized, and now post-industrial world, human beings have much more highly developed ego structures than the members of premodern cultures studied by van Gennep and Turner, among others. With greater ego development comes a greater sense of personal identity and a greater need to keep the self-sense intact. The ego can create a variety of defenses (Freud made his career, in part, by identifying the ego’s defense mechanisms and finding ways to circumvent them) in order to keep identity intact. Liminality brought on by a major life event, or even by unconscious processes in the psyche, has a tendency to poke holes in the self-concept and to reduce the solidity of one’s self-sense.
I propose that we seek out opportunities to "come undone." Coming undone is the way I describe those times in our lives when events or our own choices work to break up stagnant and solidified elements of self-identity. The fundamental element that makes possible any form of change is a reduction in ego defense mechanisms. Traumatic life events serve this purpose but can also plunge us into depths of liminality that we may not be capable of handling on our own. Ritualized initiation can serve this same purpose in a controlled manner. When we emerge from the initiation experience, if it has been given the weight it deserves, we will feel transformed.
The final stage, the return, marks the re-entry of the individual into the tribe, the group, or the culture as a new person. The individual assumes the new identity and adopts behaviors consistent with the new role. A boy having completed a puberty rite may now be given a new name, signifying his adulthood, a weapon with which to hunt, a hut in which to live, and so on. He is now a man in the eyes of the group, though he may still have years of training and future initiations to undertake before he is permitted to take a wife, hunt on his own, and be given other rights by the group.
When a Western person completes a transitional period, the individual may make certain changes in how s/he is perceived by the world, including clothing, occupation, name, and other “structural” changes, while also adopting less obvious traits such a new perspective, greater depth of identity, more comfort with ambiguity, less rigid thinking, and so on. Because transitions are not socially acknowledged in the West, there are no agreed upon ways to act following a major transition, or ways to regard someone who has completed a transitional period. Even the “ritual” of a hospital stay following an operation or serious illness has been eliminated by the HMO and managed health care systems. The only real tradition still intact for modern human beings having completed an important life transition is the honeymoon, and even that is a waning tradition.
Separation / Initiation / Return. The three stages of ritual and also the structure of the monomyth. Everyone must go through this in one way or another. Until we do--through the death of a parent or a friend, the loss of a significant relationship, being fired from a job, or any other form of change, including those we choose--our identity will not be fully formed. It may take several traumatic events to move us toward our true nature. Some people never take the hint and reject every call for transformation.
We must learn to recognize the rupture, the break in plane, when it occurs and to see it for what it is--spiritual initiation. It is the rupturing of linear time and an entry into cyclical time, sacred time. The threshold is the mystery, the risk, the threat. But we can seek it out, befriend it, and learn its secrets. We can cultivate surrender as an active principle. We can sink roots into cyclical time so that no matter how challenged we are in the linear world, we will have a grounding, a connection. We can activate the tribal level in our consciousness and experience the world as an interconnected mystery, a sacred place. This is not regression, but becoming more whole.
[Some of the material in this post is from a manuscript in progress, The Structures of Change.]
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Poem: Soulless
Before Every Dawn
(07.26.05)
I come here to listen to the waves.
Several steps away from the shoreline.
I tilt my head, eyes closed
to the utter dismay of flickering
celestials seeking wistful
worship. For I
come here to listen
as the waves chant their way
nearer; they croon as they graze
the sand in haunting reverence.
And I
hear the languished
whisper. The hum I give
words to. The song that has become
mine amidst the stillness — the solace
and despair — of knowing
even the night cannot conceal
what is no longer
there. When I leave,
dawn follows. So do you.
You would come here, too
defying the trill of the waves.
Out of dreams that time cannot
but deny, you
build sandcastles
several steps away from the shoreline
on top of my grave.
~ Soulless hails from Manila, Philippines and can be found at Unguarded Utterance.
(07.26.05)
I come here to listen to the waves.
Several steps away from the shoreline.
I tilt my head, eyes closed
to the utter dismay of flickering
celestials seeking wistful
worship. For I
come here to listen
as the waves chant their way
nearer; they croon as they graze
the sand in haunting reverence.
And I
hear the languished
whisper. The hum I give
words to. The song that has become
mine amidst the stillness — the solace
and despair — of knowing
even the night cannot conceal
what is no longer
there. When I leave,
dawn follows. So do you.
You would come here, too
defying the trill of the waves.
Out of dreams that time cannot
but deny, you
build sandcastles
several steps away from the shoreline
on top of my grave.
~ Soulless hails from Manila, Philippines and can be found at Unguarded Utterance.
Two Photos: Diana Micu
"Wine Cellar"
"Barefoot Song"
~More of Diana Micu's work can be seen at her home page. She lives in Romania.
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