In which Your Humble Blogger, for one brief, shining writing session, gets it right:
"Departure"
Later, once the pain has settled
And is waiting in exchange for
Boredom, you'll try thinking about
How your arms lifted each other.
But the memory isn't yours
Any more than the morning was,
And the clock has that in its hands.
The wheels on which the morning turned
Will be touching another ground
By then, leaving you with the notes,
The pictures, the scattering trails,
Remnants of the wind that brought her
To you, reminders of the sky
That took her back.
* * *
I didn't think that I was going to get much of anything done the night before we left for San Diego Comic Con. I'm a fidgety traveler, and I like to go over my travel preparations many, many times before I actually leave. When I sat down for my self-mandated writing session that night, I found that all I had on the brain was air travel.
So I decided to write about that.
I thought about some of the people I often see at airports. The looks I see on many of their faces suggested this story. And somehow, it came out more accurate than many other things I've written.
It's another poem written in syllables (the last line breaks the pattern -- hey, who doesn't like some dramatic effect?), but the language seemed to flow into those syllables more naturally, and the words painted the picture I wanted. The metaphor is tight, tighter, at least, than I've been able to craft them in the past. And if the idea of "the wind that brought her/To you" carries some cheese, I'll happily accept it for the snap to reality that "the sky/That took her back" provides. I think I actually shook a little after I wrote it, just because this was the closest I had come to putting the kind of writing that I want to be responsible for on paper.
As you'll see in the next couple of posts, that potential got shot to hell right quickly after I wrote this.
Well, we'll decide that, Sheila! This one has very nice imagery!
ReplyDeleteOh you are way too hard on yourself, missy. I'm not a professional writer or even someone who's ever had a handle producing the creative stuff, so I can't really offer anything in the way of experienced critique. But as a random someone who loves language and the different shapes it can take, I love this one -- it does stand tall. It's a rare but powerful piece that can strike at the center of something individual and personal but universal, polishing up ambiguous feelings and memories. And that's what the best poems do, no? Congrats.
ReplyDeleteYou both humble me, and I love you both very much.
ReplyDeleteAs for being hard on myself, eh, when I say that the potential got shot down in this case, it has less to do with my assessment of my writing skills than it does that one long month stuck in a warehouse....