Gathering shells (my poem/work in progress)
This poem is from my other blog (reliquary in a wall of silence). The address is linked above.
I'm posting it here as well, though slightly revised because I'd like some feedback/constructive criticism and responses to both versions. So please do respond. Peace!
"Gathering shells"
The sand winks
its countless eyes
softly inviting
hypnotizing
in the heat.
The ground winces
whimpers
moans
as it is trampled
by heavy
tired feet
rotting in boots.
This is the feel
of shrivelling
rusted hope.
This is the sound of a letter home
received two years too late
as time is punctuated by phone calls
and condolences
lives on hold
waiting, wondering
tortured by every dial tone
and wishful thinking:
are they sure?
are they sure?
Every new witness wall
begs the question
Where will all of these new names fit
when the land tires of so much blood
and need
for monument?
Stories
survivors' tales
memoirs and poems
speak of the sea made metal
of ships swallowing the ocean whole
as Israel waged a holy war
raining bullets
upon Lebanon.
Some have remarked
that this was the time
mice became cats
who turned others into mice.
Movies depict shrapnel tattoos
bouncing betty infections
and landmine lovers that could make one man two.
But they cannot quite capture
the sight
(burned into your head through the holes
that were your eyes)
of men picking the pieces of their friend
out of glistening sunlit branches.
And musical scores?
Symphonies?
What possible songs
do the dead have left to sing?
What poetry shall fingerless hands compose?
What comfort can war offer
a wife whose husband has come home
but in his dreams, sees her as the enemy
transforming her skin into brown black or red
his fists into a grenade
her cries, a woman's bones, all
become ribs of a concrete house
of a world
about to implode.
Words gather shells
of memory
in trembling childlike palms.
Saltwater strips the shore
yielding more and more bleached bone
but who will take these memories home?
Who cares to collect them?
How does a voiceless body speak?
No one listens
with ears of stone
to heads exploding
into fields
dripping
red carnations.
1 Comments:
Jen,
I like this poem. Its power is in its images. You feel deeply what you are writing.
There are a couple of moments, though, where you move from "showing" into "telling," as though you don't trust the power of those images to resonate/detonate in your reader's mind and instead feel compelled to narrate.
This is a matter of taste and personal opinion, of course. But for me, the (in)justice of war, how to memorialize those who die and those who serve even if we are fundamentally opposed to the war in which they serve . . . those issues, for me, transcend time and place; to my mind, your poem is at its strongest precisely at those points where I can't identify just what war you're talking about.
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