…And God, he made the earth from ash and dust
He lit the stars returning to their place
In dreams of Eve, He fostered Adam’s lust
And stretch’d it o’er with skin and gave it grace
Her body’s sails did fill out with a gust
Of holy breath; a smile licked Adam’s face
The holy heads that tongues of flame do lick
They turn to ash the deeds of murd’rous men
Speak healing to the sails, the seas, the sick
To fathers, sons return from the pig pen
Mud from their skin mortars a house of brick;
The dreamhouse of “thy will be done, amen.”
Sometimes we are commanded in our dreams
To lick and seal, roll a scroll, and eat it.
The parchment skin unfurl’d from candy reams
Is ash when our stomach turns to meet it
The mouth cannot return the words it seems,
Galilean sailors can’t repeat it
One day that scroll, like a sail, will unroll
A future dream illumined to reveal
returning revelations to our soul
that faulty licking lips cannot repeal
this flesh of living ash may take its toll
but your skin at such price would be a steal
How will our skin fare in tribulation?
They will stretch it on a righteous sailboat
To escape the ash of conflagration
Dividing their dreams between sheep and goat
Lick the crux of transubstantiation
Returning to God on a scripture quote
And earth returning to its former state
Sloughs off the shell of life like dying skin
With hands of fire God licks clean the slate
His Spirit over the deep, sailing in
With new dreams of life, the flower of fate
Blooms in the ash where other life had been
Since, Eve, we will return to dust and ash
Wake my dream to your skin; its smiling flash,
Wind-licked like a sail with an open lash
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
ok, some things about this poem.
i almost quit it halfway through, because honestly it is a little aimless. and was difficult to write.
its a version of a sestina, for which there are all sorts of rules i've broken here -- in its strictest form, it rotates six words through the lines of six stanzas and uses them all in the seventh stanza, according to a specific set of rules. each line is supposed to be written in iambic pentameter. each line is supposed to end on one of the six words. and there is absolutely no rhyming invovled.
rules i've broken here:
-rhyming. and now i know why you aren't supposed to do it with this kind of poem
-my six words. i used different tenses and participles of the six words. i riffed on them a little bit. (also, i don't know what i was thinking when i picked a word like "lick." am i some kind of idiot? what was i thinking? that was a challenge i was barely up to.)
-iambic pentameter. i do ok with it. when it comes to metrical footing in poetry, i'd just as soon do without it. i suck at it. the point of this exercise was ultimately to see how well i do with trying to keep up that aspect of the sestina. i maintain the pentameter part pretty well. the iambic part i slip on like a banana peel, but as that isn't quite as much of a faux pas, i am ok with it.
thing about the way i approached this is that i had too many formal considerations, and therefore, to some extent, form was determining content. the poem doesn't say what i wanted it to say as precisely as i wanted to say it. there is some quote out there from Milton where he talks about the use of rhyme and how it hedges poets in from writing something they really want to say. i for one like rhyme but i understand his point. especially now.
but i wasn't feeling the sting of rhyme so much as my poor choice of words. i picked them at random, and halfway through the poem i remembered a rule i stumbled on when i wrote my first sestina, which was to write a stanza first, and then pick your words out of that.
ah well, now i know for next time.
one thing i am happy with is the seventh stanza; i think it is the best envoi (i had to look that up, btw) i've written for the few sestinas i've ever attempted. again, i don't like the rhyme stricture i'd left myself with, but i think its passable there. but the other formal considerations -- meter, and word usage -- i think read pretty naturally.
anyways. there it is.
by the way, the magic words, if you need help, are:
1.ash
2.return
3.dream
4.skin
5.sail
6.lick
this, of course, is not meant in any way to insult your intelligence.
i rewrote almost all of the fourth stanza today (2/20), aside from the first line, and rewrote the fourth and sixth lines of the fifth stanza.
and i changed the first word of the sixth stanza from "the" to "and"
all to the immense and immeasurable benefit of the poem i might add.
i don't usually like to do much revision, but the faults suddenly seemed glaring. anyway, there you have it.
Post a Comment