Take bloom, for example.
Yes, flowers shrivel and curl,
and leaves brown and fall,
but the necessity of death
doesn’t necessarily undo
the accident of birth.
To wither does not
wipe away the memory
of opening slowly and
suddenly.
Rain, too, is
without a mirror image.
Though each raindrop
reflects a desert and each
rainbow shatters sunlight
into streaks of color,
I do not hear the words
hot and dry in the
echo of rainfall.
And let us not
forget language,
for your touch speaks
without words,
each gesture writes
love songs and hymns.
Silence, too, can
sing the praises
of all those other
words without opposites.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
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4 comments:
i should have known that email was the beginning of something more lyrical. :)
i love the title and your examples. "the necessity of death doesn't necessarily undo the accident of birth" is a wonderful line(s). (i'd change "to wither" to "withering" though, for parallelism's sake …)
in the rain stanza, i think you can tighten the syllables some. "rain, too, has no mirror" for example, and "each raindrop reflects desert" - the second recommendation because rain evokes the whole quality of desert, not one desert in specific.
and finally how about "silence too sings praises"? if you take out some auxiliary words you let your reader's mind wander a bit more freely through the images you shape here.
i am mulling over "each gesture writes love songs and hymns" - the feel of the phrase in my throat, it's velvety. thank you for that.
i keep coming back to this poem. sorry for all the critique - please take it as a compliment. :) it's so evocative, got right under my skin.
what i forgot to say earlier - i love the opening line. like a conversation between the poem and its title, which enlarges (circles in water) to encompass the other strophes, the reader, the whole natural world and the very concept of love. again, thank you for this one. it has made my little brain sing. (and is there a word for that?)
thanks! for all the criticism. seriously. i do not live in a world where i think critically about my writing - especially poetry. the poems just come, and i rarely have an idea about how to make them better.
i envy that world, and wish my poems "just came" more often, without lugging their huge valises of self-editing and word-measuring behind …
:)
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