Listen

[hack]

Hear me wall,
listen reed hut,
I am not the wind
I am not the pallid voice
of fading life
I am not the dimming sun
nor the absent moon

I am the whisper
against the roaring black of night,
earth is my food
I am built of clay and rain

Clothed in ashes
I fall then rise
and come again
hard on the heels of death

Hear me wall,
listen reed hut,
I am ocher slathered onto bone
I am the gaze set on carnelian
and hillsides painted green

Hear me,
I am the wellspring of souls
I am tears and joy

I am the found names
of ten thousand gods
listen
to their silence
as they pass

[Hawkman]

Hi hack & welcome back to these boards. I must say I very much enjoyed this poem. It's mournful rhetoric is very affecting.

If it has a weakness I think it would be in the first stanza. I keep asking if we need to know what the narrator is not. I also baulked a bit at "paled voice". Is the voice (im)paled, hammered into the ground like a fence-post, or is it pale as in white? If the latter I think pallid might have been a beter word.

Happy New Year. May you live and be well - H

[hillwalker]

It has a primeval quality - the narrator personifying the earth from its birth to the present day and perhaps beyond. A great read.

H

[hack]

Thanks Hawk and Hill. It is from an very old poem.
Google "listen reed hut" and you will see its genesis,
or perhaps its Genesis. I wish I had thought to
use pallid instead, as you suggest.

[cafolini]

It's a great potential. Excellent subject. But I think the repetitions are boring. It should be half as long. The last few lines could have a lot more impact that way.
One more thing. Let the earth talk to men and women. Instead of "hear me wall," how about "hear me ye in between walls, hear me those in the reed huts..."

[PrinceMyshkin]

The tone I get (and like) is somewhere between mournful and oracular, a strength discovered at a (very?) low point.

[Jack of Hearts]

Ah hah. That section of the Epic of Gilgamesh sheds light on why this reader interpreted it first as primordial life force and earth as a distant second (for some reason he thought the poem had to be about one or the other). This poem is about 'keeping your soul alive.'









J

[blank|verse]

An intriguing and forceful poem, hack. Enjoyable stuff. I was unaware of its source; it certainly sounded biblical, with those rolling cadences and the anaphoric lines.

I'm in agreement with cafolini that some of the imperative repetitions are unnecessary and detract from the flow of the poem. I'd consider dropping them from stanzas 2, 3 and 4, to bring them back in stanza 5 by way of conclusion, which might have greater impact.

I wonder if 'pale voice' would work; for some reason 'pallid' sounds a bit fussy for someone making emphatic demands, but just a thought. Good poem.

[Delta40]

Enjoyable poem Hack like some mysterious lull as the forces of nature clash.

[hack]

Thanks all.
The repetitions are in the style of the original.
The opening lines are meant to inform the reader
that the sound outside is neither the wind nor a ghost.
The poem is about art.
It is also about religion as a subset of art.