December 08, 2007

Sarah: Poetry

I love the first stanza especially.

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
by Adrienne Rich

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control.

A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

Posted by sarah at December 08, 2007 11:30 PM
Comments

I was brutally savaged by grammar once. Generally, I'm a live-and-let live type, but for my own protection I now keep a fifteen year old's LiveJournal with me at all times to distract grammar while I run screaming in the other direction.

Posted by: Spin on December 8, 2007 11:01 AM
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