“And I long for the blast of dynamite”–Roethke
an excruciating crushing
might also be a waking.
summer’s end . . .
sat in a park at sunset with
my self, some fireflies and mosquitoes—also
dying
on the bank of a stream that had nearly expired from
thirst,
a few
puddles only
there
in the dim light
did languish in that stony bed,
blood drying on a wound.
Was it a wholesome healing?
Was it the false scab that hides infection?
. . . a few bats flipped their shapes above the treetops
on the stream bed’s farther side
my heart was sinking with the day
into distraction
(“I’m too much with this wormtongue ‘I,’”–a whisper)
and I fought to see those bats not flies
Rafael
Kaosar (Raatkiranii)
Abdur Rahman
tielansari
danielabdalhayymoore
Seth
2 comments
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July 24, 2008 at 11:16 am
Seth
This is just a bit of an experiment with line length, rhythm, diction and tone. I’ve been revisiting Theodore Roethke’s “North American Sequence” after several years of almost exclusively reading and (occasionally) writing “traditional” verse. So I’m going through a bit of a process right now of pushing in different stylistic directions and trying to find a more authentic “voice.” It’s a bit of a late apprenticeship. Roethke’s sequence [from which the epigraph is taken] seems to me an extraordinary piece of modern spiritual writing—although he wasn’t a Muslim [to my knowledge], I can readily identify with his description of a slow agonizing coming into awareness and a longing—because of the pain involved—for the “dynamite” blast of sudden enlightenment. So the speaker of this poem has a similar problem in that he is still in transit, still in the state of viewing the world [here, the streambed] as a sick bed, a place of mourning and suffering. It’s similar to Prufrock’s evening “like a patient etherized on a table”—but I think that whereas Eliot’s speaker seems to give up in despair at the end of the poem [“Till human voices wake us, and we drown”], the speaker here is still struggling at poem’s end to get over his trouble. He hasn’t given up. As he says in the last line: “I fought to see those bats not flies” [i.e. the flies that are drawn to a corpse]. In other words, he knows that his problem is his ego, in his ego-centered vision of the world, not in the world itself.
July 31, 2008 at 2:04 am
Telemachus
My most humble opinion is that you do quite well with line length, rhythm, diction and tone. There’s a natural flow to this piece; however, what I love most is your strong use of imagery. I love the image of a few bats flipping their shapes over the treetops. Death appears to abound, from the pests to the drying up stream; you capture that very well. Let’s hope it is symbolic of the ego dying.