Comments and criticism very welcome:
Graveside
Flowers aren’t enough
We start out going weekly, quickly
Fading into monthly, monthly
Into yearly and yearly
Added to the budget: Annual Bouquet, $50.
We give dead flowers to the dead,
Living for ones that are alive
Write elegies in a country churchyard
Kneel or weep into a napkin.
There is no place for the ancestors,
Hovering over us critically
Like bees before a flower.
And we wonder why our honey tastes bland,
Hovering over our own fountains
Of nectar and pollen, packing
Our throats with sweet and our leg flaps with powder.
We buzz around the city
And finally outside it,
Wilting flower after flower till we reach
A spray of roses, abandoned with love
By a wet, stone tablet.
But the roses are parched
Ruby-throated necks slit
And we waft a little lower
Where a small clover grows,
a red eye just cracked open,
yawning to the spring of its ruddy childhood.
5/7/08
2 comments:
Hullo Nathan. I'm here to nitpick as usual. ;)
- The 2nd and 3rd lines do a little rhythmic thing when you repeat the similarl/same word at the end, and the "and" throws it off in the 4th line.
- I really like the image of ancestors as bees. It says what you want to say with a neat image and also ties in beautifully with the initial flowers.
- I think you muddle it when you make us the bees in the next stanza when we were the flowers before. You go interesting places with that image too, but I think the inconsistency is disruptive unless you transition meaningfully.
- Do you mean any particular allusion to the 10 commandments by calling the last tombstone a stone tablet? I'm not sure what you mean if you do.
- I don't understand the ending. I'll come back and post again if it clicks sometime soon.
nathan,
i particularly like "weep into a napkin"... cloth napkin? paper? is it supposed to be a cheap napkin? a word like "paper" might help? i'm noticing that you tend not to hamper your sentences with adjectives and adverbs in the beginning.
i love how the word "ruddy" tastes, but i can't say i understand the poem.
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