To Point a World Aright in Words

 

I am the workmanship of words

Turned precise, of loneliness lost

To the fading color of birds

 

Like melted ice I am a chameleon of spring

Literature has become my gasp and drive

The last ancient script of my faith

 

I take form through her paragraphs

My emotions silhouette the parenthesis

Italics, bathes my last longings

 

Look closer, do you see a name, a face

That might be the terminus of some holy place

Life seized in strips of little rags of prophecy

 

All experience is held in code and incontinence

If beauty can set her shrine lost in a date

Maybe your loveliness can be recovered like youth

 

I am the workmanship of limitations, letters

Cut in my flesh, I must die to this.

Reviews

[Girl Friday (Sarah W.)]

I like the flow of this one, and the earnest desire for your craft. Lots of great imagery, and a host of interesting phrases.

The idea of the word, a poem, story, whatever, having a life of its own, and yet being created by someone who feels such a need for expression is quite delightful. The last two lines really did it for me with this one.

[Sympatico]

Yes you like my endings I guess.

[Girl Friday (Sarah W.)]

Probably because I don't feel as though my endings are as good...it's a compliment.

[Sympatico]

Well your poems are longer..

[Girl Friday (Sarah W.)]

So I shall take the shears to them,
like flowers grown too wild,
off with their pretty heads, shorten
their sultry stems, until like me
they are small and incomplete...

[Sympatico]

It would do justice to your future selected works! If I have to slap you silly to literary greatness, will you forever hate me?

[Girl Friday (Sarah W.)]

I think you've been doing that for...oh...a week or more now.

In your verse I find my lines,
In your lines, I find my verse,
symbiotic creatures intent
upon delving too deeply
into the great, uncharted deep...ugh...ugh, ugh...

[Sympatico]

but you don't hate me yet?

[Girl Friday (Sarah W.)]

I wouldn't use the word "hate", no...

[Anne Martin]

I like the imagery in the this, as well as the alliteration: "Like melted ice I am a chameleon of spring" and "the fading color of birds." "The last ancient script of my faith."

Well-crafted and poignant. More should read this. Bravo.

[Sympatico]

Yes spring is being good to me Anne!

[Anne Martin]

Let's hope it is good for me, too. Winter surely wasn't.

[Sympatico]

Yeah no kidding, I've suffered a lot since November.

[Michael Kevin Spencer]

Yeah I know the feeling!