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Bothersome Continuity
A child pressed the drying air
In a desperate prayer
For snow
The blind hero swung—
So wild—his axe
To paralyze the foe
Intimates send their greeting cards
But have left me quite alone
On the grass, I lie, with a wrinkled note
And the ghost of a telephone
Empty-eyed mothers said ‘pity’
‘Quite a pity’ all the actors agreed
To draw my attention away from the serf in the yard
Who hastily buries
A seed
My father told me that death is a door
To diminish the dream
And the dread
But it’s hard to believe
When I’m wrapped up in grief
And he in the sheets
Of a hospital bed
Tender fingers on my arm
Try to impress the impermanence
Of the end
But I know something passed away
When I heard my sweetheart say:
‘I love you, dear—
But only
As a friend’
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This article has 16 comments.
I don't know why, but the third stanza, specifically "To draw my attention from/the serf in the yard/Who hastily buries/A seed," stuck out in my mind. I quite enjoyed the imagery this piece projected.
I don't know that I can answer that very well, perhaps because I'm not really sure myself. All I do know is that it's (to me) the most tragic kind of love, but also the softest.
It's a sort of shapeshifting; I think you described it pretty well. Again, I am not my poems, but my poems are me. I suppose when I write poems, I'm collecting little bits of myself and putting them under a different light. But most of them still come straight from my deepest of hearts.
There seems to be a reoccurring verse about unrequited love in many of your poems, if not all. Why is that?
I rather like the rhythm of this poem, though I'm not sure if I can explain why.
I think you have a way of shapeshifting when you write poetry, a way of seeing through eyes that aren't necessarily your own? I probably have it all wrong, you said that your poetry is you. But maybe it can be that while almost seeming to be seen through someone else's eyes at the same time. It really sounds contradictory when you think about it, but when I look at it on a different angle, it doesn't look so oxymoronic.
Life goes on, as I've been told so many times before.