Silas Thorne's Journal

I really like this Silas! It reminds me of my own boyhood (which, even if it isn't all that far gone by years, it seems a lifetime ago.) Childish imagination is a wonderful thing to have and such a terrible thing to lose. I think you still have some of it still.

Thanks skib! I'm glad I touched that spark of memory in you about the places of your youth.

I fear that soon my comments will become all too redundant... what can I say, Silas? Another beautiful poem.... full of nostalgia.

Seeing as I am chornically nostalgic, I identify with the feel of your words...

I guess, when we can't do it anymore, we write about it. Thanks for the memories Silas. Excellent poem. Vivid.

Oh, oh, I wanted to comment on this but I got distracted!

Behind my grandparents' house it used to be aaall woods. You could walk and walk and walk and never hit a road or another yard. It was where our forts were, where I brewed my witch's potions and kept them in old glass medicine bottles, where I kept leaf packets of random herbs. I could always go back and find it to be just the same as when I'd left it. Over the years, I've watched the forest become smaller and smaller, until my grandfather had to set up a wooden fence to mark his land, to where you can see the backporch of the house that sits where the woods used to be. We drive through the neighborhood that used to be my forest, and I wonder if any of those people realize that they live on my dreams, on my fantasies, on magic. They don't, of course, and it's not their fault.

They took away my Treants too.

I still climb trees (I have a favorite on campus called the "Sitting Tree"), but I miss my woods.

This captured the pain of change so brilliantly, the loss of our childhood realms of wonder that we can now only keep in memory. Wonderful, Silas.

Thanks PoeticPassions, Sophia and little wisp!
And, little wisp, thank you for relating your individual history and the loss of your own woods and private myth-making locale.

Another really good one Silas. You have really developed your voice. Here's my favorite:

where once we, barefoot,
could in our stealth assault our friends in play
and play rough boyhood madness
while the weather held.

or perhaps this

And for those fine Treants, kings of trees
whose springy arms we used to roll us down to earth,
and hanging off play moonmen walking,
all too few in number now.

I like the way you bend natural word order. It really heightens the lines.

Thanks, I really value your comments, Virgil. And thanks too for stopping by.

Having come late to this poem, I can only say ditto, ditto and again ditto to all the encomiums that preceded me. One of the things I greatly admire in this and your other poems is your stunning vocabulary of words little used elsewhere in these threads - or anywhere, so far as I know! The poems are always wonderfully well-wrought, the unfamiliar words little gifts that are strewn along the way.

Hey, I just read this open mic tonight and many people in the poetry scene here really got into it, so I suppose this one can't be too bad. I'll keep weaving these wordtales and see where the threads lead me for a bit.
And thank you so much for the comments too, Prince. Maybe it's because my vocabulary is poor that I mix the little words up more.