AND SO......THE WORD IS......tell us firefangled.....what should our new word be?
AND SO......THE WORD IS......tell us firefangled.....what should our new word be?
Since we have all been guilty of sinful desires...
The new word is Penance.
Get out your cat-o-nine-tails, your hair shirts. Down on your shameful knees poets and start writing those things that will forgive us all.
Mea culpa, mea maximum culpa. Et cum spiritu tuo.
hehehehe very good
that's not my offering, just my comment
Penance
If a true plea had wings so innocent and fair,
through which place or time would mine have to
sour to show that penance is the threshold,
desire, the door, which needs be unbolted to liberate
my stall of lashes, wrinkles, blood and gore. For I've
waded in the depths of evil's shore and have delved
in the caves of leviathans galore
who dented my flesh,
halved my soul and
residued the rest
of me
on the deep sea floor.
Last edited by Adolescent09; 07-07-2007 at 10:11 PM.
My hide hides the heart inside
She sings of pins, the mouths of birds,
among the sheets her mother hangs,
of wings which rise with night
and stir the air of dreams throughout the house.
Monsignor tells her, God hides in song,
and waits for her at the hour of death.
She is more direct with spirit things,
dreams of Kyries to feed the wings of sleep.
Father guides the choir, gives her scales
she evaporates in meadow larks,
and thrushes on the way, the room left quiet,
hushed and still like unnoticed rain.
The sisters give her pages, signed with clefs,
and birds in cages fluttering solfeggios:
she sets them free before their paper clouds,
in a sky the sisters do not see.
She sleeps in sheets crisp with the day.
Like will-o'-the-wisp her breathing winds
around the bed, the chair and past the open sill,
as birds wait silently in the unfinished air.
Oh, I hate being first, but I do know penance.
I don't know how you do it, fire. I wouldn't be able to come up with something like that if I spent a week on it.
My hide hides the heart inside
*******Originally Posted by Adolescent09
If you have ever read the passage in Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man where Stephen Dedalus is enduring a sermon on the torments of hell, these are worthy lines to that effect. Go in peace.
Really? Thanks. I sort of tweaked it though..:
I'm not sure if it makes a difference though.Penance
If a true plea had wings so innocent and fair,
through which place or time would mine have to
sour to show that penance is the threshold,
desire, the door, which needs be unbolted to liberate
my stall of lashes, wrinkles, blood and gore. For I've
waded in the depths of evil's shore and have been delved
in the caves of leviathans galore
who dented my flesh,
halved my soul and
residued the rest
of me
on the deep sea floor.
My hide hides the heart inside
There was actually a young girl named Magaret in my grade school who was like Charlotte Church and could fill the rafters with her voice. It was truly amazing.
For this she was envied by both the sisters and the choir master, who preferred supplication to exaltation. So she was surreptitiously persecuted. She was about 8 years old I guess and never flinched no matter what was thrown at her.
When she moved the people of the parrish asked about her so frequently, they made an announcement of it from the pulpit and the entire gathering sighed.
She always comes to mind when I contemplate the act of atonement, for she was, and is, one of the primary examples of the truth of that act in my life.
Penance
I point myself to the corner and I shuffle there and slump against the wall, pouting.
I knew what I did when I did it and was sorry, but here I am wondering how tall I am.
I straighten myself up trying to measure myself by the bookcase across the room.
Am I really up to Tan and Tolkein and Trollope when surely it was only yesterday I stood with Updike and Uris?
I yawn and lean again against the wall, looking at my fingernails and I begin to hum some song in three-quarter time.
I hang my head and my face contorts like some dried apple dolly and I cry terrible tears.
"Oh God, I am so sorry. I am so pitifully pathetic. What you must think of me."
I stand there silently, holding my breath, looking around, as if to see if I am still here.
With a deep breath, I shake my head back and forth very slowly while looking inside myself.
At the count of ten I dislodge myself and walk over to the open window and pull back the lace curtain.
I sit on the plush, flowered window seat and sing to the birds, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound..."
They stop for a moment looking toward the window where the sound is coming from,
As if on springboards, they fly off into the sky as if to say, 'we know, we know, we know'.
My favorite parts of poems are endings and you have an enormous capability of leading your poems to endings that make me just go...oh yes.
This is so honest describing our attempts at penance with our corporeal preoccupations as humans and our self pity for which we seem to have no means of fighting outside a monestary. I loved it. And isn't it always the birds with the resolution...Billy Collins come to mind here...In the Room of a Thousand Miles
Well done.
Some folk make poems as if with a dictionary, a thesaurus, a book of quotations at their elbows and thousands of half-remembered poems flipping through their minds while they wrestle the syntax to the ground, best two out of three falls,
But not you! It is as if this is the simplest way to say what you have to say, the most direct - and it needs to be said!
Fromto the very end I was caught, mesmerized.
The slow pulse of the black-water ballet,
in the deep country of the fireflies:
In yellow memory, in chains,
fragrance cupped from the dark lawn
— every petal was a mouth —
hungry, efflorescent stars,
one for many on a milky stem:
They fell with the veil of night, laden
with the bright of sun, and we would wait
for what was done in the dale of evening,
in the pale of the moonlit grass. They died,
if patience failed to hold us for their flights,
such fragile dolia of blossoms gone to light,
we galled them with a child’s haste,
watched their constellations slide
down blades and on our skin
with the scent of dandelion.
Oh silent aria of desire,
world of blind intent,
keep the secrets of your child:
wild flowers can redeem us
wishes gray make wishes green
fire hides in the quiet air
the choired whispers of the sea
are born in the twists of shells
and this cool water with its stars
ripples briefly in our eyes.
My God, how beautiful this is! I have started a file on my hard-drive in which to keep your poems aswell as whatever communications pass between us.
I don't know quite what to say except that I feel what Prince wrote. I also love the picture of the jar with perhaps small chains wrapped around its base.
So, Prince, will you have an offering of Penance for us?
Adolescent09...be thinking of our next word, please.
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