Bon bon bon...
Nov. 9th, 2003 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieCircle K held a bonfire down at the environmental center tonight, and the four-person (flute, violin, guitar, bodhran (so didn't spell that right...)) Irish band that Whitney is part of played. First of all, they call themselves Potato Famine. You know that has to be good. ;) And they were awesome. Very much on the Gaelic Storm sound-alikeness, since they were playing GS songs, for the most part, but that's not a bad thing. I thought they sounded really good.
Anyway, Whitney said that they were looking for female singers, so Chandra and I volunteered ourselves. Actually, it was more like Chandra volunteered and I sort of came along for the ride, but it could definitely be fun. We'll have to see how it turns out. :)
And the latest poem for my poetry class, because for the first time in almost a month, I like what I've written. The assignment was to "leave instructions for your funeral." Somehow, I latched on to Emily Dickinson for stylistic influences. Gee, I wonder why.
Traveler
A funeral!
Why should I care
to have a funeral?
I will not have crying.
I will not be mourned;
I will not ask you
to invite death in your door
with each pulsing sob for me.
You can have your funerals
at Camelot, with all
the plumes and lights
you can pack into the castle.
You can mourn the coming
of a second April.
You can have your
farm-wagon hearse
and your twenty-one gun salutes.
But not for me!
I will not have it.
You will instead
do the work of worms
double-time
and convert me to ash.
From there, you will
take me to the shore
of some great ocean,
early on a morning
when the waves
are caressing each grain of sand.
You will cup me
with flat hands
and let the salty wind
carry me onto the foam.
(I always loved to feel the wind
in my hair and on my face.)
Traveling the old way,
by wind and water,
I will make my way
around the world
in many more than 80 days.
I will take my time
and see everything I missed
when I was trapped in life.
And when you
have seen me off,
you will turn
to see the sun
and smile at the coming day.
Actually, come to think of it, there was another recent one that I liked. Let's see if I can find it...
Rainy Mourning
You left like the First Union building
downtown. They tore down that old, grey tower
last February to make room for something new.
But every morning when I drive in on I-40,
I still expect to see it amongst the other skyscrapers,
standing out like a poor and distant relative
among the new, gleaming spires of glass and steel.
They say that the hole in the skyline
will soon be filled with offices
on the cutting edge of modernity.
Maybe I will work in one of them.
Maybe I will look out on the city
from the thirty-second floor
and forget, for a while,
that I am held within a monument
to mirrored glass, and remember
wind-pitted concrete
that always went darker when it rained.
And what the hell, here's my sestina...
A History Lesson
You can feel it heavy on the air,
history rising like steam on a summer day,
coating the trees, the grass, the graves.
Below these monuments and open fields
lurk trickling, dribbling rivers of blood
which wait only for a place to well up.
Shiloh, the marker says, or maybe Gettysburg. It's up
to you. You can practically hear the cries on the air
shot through with vanishing sunlight so red it looks like the blood
that's waiting underground. On this day
in history, these very fields
covered themselves in the bodies which inhabit those graves
on the hill. All of the mothers who had a son fill these graves
added their tears to the blood, mixing it all up
into a chemical compound that coats these fields
like dew. A sticky breeze swirls the stagnant air
now, turning up old memories that still live a kind of half-life today,
fed by the underground streams of blood.
We are bound in this nation by the mingled blood
thes unknown soldiers spilled here before going to their graves.
And yet there are those who piece it out, drop by drop, day after day,
watching and waiting for the blood to well up
and begin a slow burn in the summer sun. It fills the air
with smoke that reminds you of those long-ago battlefields.
And if the ghosts that haunt these fields
could speak, would they talk of this blood
that comes up for air
every time we speak of accents or Confederate graves?
Would they tell us to stand up
and quit playacting them on the day
they died? There is only one day
when we are one, when these fields
become the cloth with which we sew up
the rifts between us caused by this blood
that won't stay quiet under the graves
but which pours out into the heated air.
Up here on this hill, the past hangs forever in the air.
We can't forget the graves that line these fields
and not a day goes by without the rushing of the blood.
And now I think I shall go to bed...
Anyway, Whitney said that they were looking for female singers, so Chandra and I volunteered ourselves. Actually, it was more like Chandra volunteered and I sort of came along for the ride, but it could definitely be fun. We'll have to see how it turns out. :)
And the latest poem for my poetry class, because for the first time in almost a month, I like what I've written. The assignment was to "leave instructions for your funeral." Somehow, I latched on to Emily Dickinson for stylistic influences. Gee, I wonder why.
Traveler
A funeral!
Why should I care
to have a funeral?
I will not have crying.
I will not be mourned;
I will not ask you
to invite death in your door
with each pulsing sob for me.
You can have your funerals
at Camelot, with all
the plumes and lights
you can pack into the castle.
You can mourn the coming
of a second April.
You can have your
farm-wagon hearse
and your twenty-one gun salutes.
But not for me!
I will not have it.
You will instead
do the work of worms
double-time
and convert me to ash.
From there, you will
take me to the shore
of some great ocean,
early on a morning
when the waves
are caressing each grain of sand.
You will cup me
with flat hands
and let the salty wind
carry me onto the foam.
(I always loved to feel the wind
in my hair and on my face.)
Traveling the old way,
by wind and water,
I will make my way
around the world
in many more than 80 days.
I will take my time
and see everything I missed
when I was trapped in life.
And when you
have seen me off,
you will turn
to see the sun
and smile at the coming day.
Actually, come to think of it, there was another recent one that I liked. Let's see if I can find it...
Rainy Mourning
You left like the First Union building
downtown. They tore down that old, grey tower
last February to make room for something new.
But every morning when I drive in on I-40,
I still expect to see it amongst the other skyscrapers,
standing out like a poor and distant relative
among the new, gleaming spires of glass and steel.
They say that the hole in the skyline
will soon be filled with offices
on the cutting edge of modernity.
Maybe I will work in one of them.
Maybe I will look out on the city
from the thirty-second floor
and forget, for a while,
that I am held within a monument
to mirrored glass, and remember
wind-pitted concrete
that always went darker when it rained.
And what the hell, here's my sestina...
A History Lesson
You can feel it heavy on the air,
history rising like steam on a summer day,
coating the trees, the grass, the graves.
Below these monuments and open fields
lurk trickling, dribbling rivers of blood
which wait only for a place to well up.
Shiloh, the marker says, or maybe Gettysburg. It's up
to you. You can practically hear the cries on the air
shot through with vanishing sunlight so red it looks like the blood
that's waiting underground. On this day
in history, these very fields
covered themselves in the bodies which inhabit those graves
on the hill. All of the mothers who had a son fill these graves
added their tears to the blood, mixing it all up
into a chemical compound that coats these fields
like dew. A sticky breeze swirls the stagnant air
now, turning up old memories that still live a kind of half-life today,
fed by the underground streams of blood.
We are bound in this nation by the mingled blood
thes unknown soldiers spilled here before going to their graves.
And yet there are those who piece it out, drop by drop, day after day,
watching and waiting for the blood to well up
and begin a slow burn in the summer sun. It fills the air
with smoke that reminds you of those long-ago battlefields.
And if the ghosts that haunt these fields
could speak, would they talk of this blood
that comes up for air
every time we speak of accents or Confederate graves?
Would they tell us to stand up
and quit playacting them on the day
they died? There is only one day
when we are one, when these fields
become the cloth with which we sew up
the rifts between us caused by this blood
that won't stay quiet under the graves
but which pours out into the heated air.
Up here on this hill, the past hangs forever in the air.
We can't forget the graves that line these fields
and not a day goes by without the rushing of the blood.
And now I think I shall go to bed...
