There's a new poem over at frankenstina. I wrote it this morning, after a brief foray to hang out the washing before the next batch of rain arrived (it came on time too). In case anyone is interested/critical/thinks I haven't noticed, I feel the need to explain what I was trying to do - though in fact that's not entirely true: I wrote it, then read it over and recognised what I had done more or less unconsciously as I strove to convey what I had seen and heard - and felt.
The first stanza is deliberately irregular, with erratic enjambement and random rhythms to echo the strangeness of a garden that in the recent warm and sunny weather had blossomed prodigiously and grown calm and lush. This morning it looked decidedly ruffled and awkward - hence the structure. The repetition of "light" and "lights" not an oversight, but is a deliberate play on the different meanings of the word. The reversion to a four-beat regular metre seems to reflect both the calm of other climes and the acceptance of the weather that is more common for us - and came, I suspect, as a by-product of that acceptance.
Must be the real deal then...
Not being deterred by reading something different from what you saw in your own writing, Chris, I will say that I imagined in the first stanza spiritual winter lurking in the imagery of a tattered summer day filled with discord. The second stanza spoke to me of our mundane lives, saved from pointlessness by the wind of the Spirit, of which although “you do not know where it comes from or where it goes,” you know it brings new life. Isn’t it wonderful that you give others not only the gifts you intend, but so many that you do not?
ReplyDeleteClever Walter! It was there, what you saw, but lurking, as it were, because the garden was real and the stimulus external, but led me on to reflect on the spiritual parallel. At the moment there's a further poem on the drawing board, though it's sticking a bit, having another look at an area not far from what you found.
ReplyDelete