Poetry Forum

At the risk of adding insult to injury, here's my only other poem on the same general topic as "Memoriam."

1

You cast a heavy shadow. Years will pass
Yet none who knew will ever lose the sight
Of one bright, piercing eye. You walked the world
In such a wild and vivid way, your mark
As potent as a rune on all you touched.
The rider of a winter storm, the wolf
Of wind and water and the wizard-king
Of salt and spray, an alchemist of song,
Who turned the darkness seen at Jacob's Pond
To fearsome music, and the saddest plans
The gods prepared for madmen into notes
Of such weird beauty that they seem to ring
Between the moments of this floating life
In haunted echoes. Not for you the pale,
Transparent destinies of modern man:
The doubts, the smallness and the final fall
From very little into not at all.
Your failures and your victories were large.
In everything you did you waged a long,
Determined bout with heaven, till the dawn
Lit both of you to laughter. Now you're gone.
An old, unbeaten rebel, taken back
To somewhere far away, beyond our dreams.
But every now and then it almost seems
That I can hear your voice. And what it says
Is, "Hold the course. The fight is far from done."

2

So, Captain, what is next? Do ghosts advise?
I've waged a war myself, these many years.
And yet, before you left us, you'd been cleansed
And purified by suffering so harsh
It almost broke you, into something new-
A calmer man, if never quite content.
You spent your last year pondering the past,
The things that made you and the things you made.
With pipe in mouth you watched the seasons change
While, flickering behind your eyes, the tales
Of lore and legend leaped like dancing sparks.
You loved to tell those stories! And, in all,
You featured as the hero. But your voice
Wove such a spell of magic round the words
That legend came to life for us. And now,
Tall tales and all, you've fallen into sleep.
I never wept except for that first night.
It didn't seem correct, somehow. I knew
You left this world as you'd have wanted to,
The ocean wind behind you and the spray
Blown cold against your face, the dark green sea
In all its ancient fury close beside,
And one task only- race, and try to win.
You didn't quite have long enough. But then,
There's no one here who does or ever will.
And every day your shadow knows me still.

3

Yes, I was scared of you. That's true enough.
You had a madness deep behind your eyes,
That blazed sometimes, and kindled, deep in me,
A madness of my own. Your legacy
Is complicated and its roots are dim,
And knotted up as tight as tangled hair.
I look back on these deeds of mine and find
Much sorrow and my own dark share of shame,
And here and there a little quiet pride.
Were you the same? And did you face the night
With sick self-loathing for the things you'd done,
Or did you never dare to hear that voice?
It's not my wish to judge you. All your life
You struggled with the darkness, as have I.
I know the language of the night too well
To fail to recognize its mark in you,
And recognition is forgiveness. Still,
My task, I think, is this- to give my sons
The best of you and leave those things behind
That harmed us both. In this, I'll honor you.

4

Good blades will bend, yet still come back to true,
And hold the keenest edge. To forge a sword,
White heat is needed. So you forged my life,
And poured your lore into the blue-black steel
Of what I am. Now, dip me in a stream
And leaves will part against my sharpened edge.
God willing, my own children will be blades
As sharp as I am, but will have the skill
Of teaching leaves to turn aside, unharmed.
I'll hold the ground you conquered and move on
To claim new lands as well. I owe you that.
You climbed up from the pit to make a life
Worth singing of, a story to be told.
And if I tell of darkness with the light,
My Captain, please remember, Truth is One
And undivided and I cannot sing
A portion of the truth; there's no such thing.

5

So here I stand before the salt-blue sea,
My eyes averted from the open sky.
The breeze is cold, and breakers crash and roar,
While birds cry lonely omens. Here it comes.
I face the task you faced with me, and hope
That I'm equipped to do it. But I know
The hawk-like strength of all our kin is mine,
And all that's left is just to face my task
With bold, high spirit and with love's command.
And I will tell my children, so they'll know-
Their father's father was the kind of man
Who comes into this world, not every day
But once in many years. A wolf of wind
And ocean wave, a wizard of the sea,
An alchemist of music and a man
Who fought and didn't cease his fight until
The ocean waves closed over, cold and still.
And I will tell them also, what is true-
The core of what they see in me is you.

You have a great ear for rhythm - this is very carefully done, and I think as epic narrative works very well. Also some great images:

Your legacy
Is complicated and its roots are dim,
And knotted up as tight as tangled hair.

I'd perhaps have liked to see more such images and a bit less of the rhetorical - I think the image I have of 'him' is larger than life, good and bad, so that he feels like a mixture of archetypes rather than a real person. I guess modern poetry tends to home in more on the specific, to paint a picture of an actual individual. Unspecified madness, deeds of sorrow, shame, pride - I think the Anglo-Saxons would have been with you here, but even they liked to hear details of the actual battle. But I very much enjoyed the read.

Ros

I liked this bit best:

Not for you the pale,
Transparent destinies of modern man:
The doubts, the smallness and the final fall
From very little into not at all.

especially the last two lines. My overriding impression is that it goes on a lot and that what's said could have been said in one or two verses.And that there's rather too much Fight the Good Fight and when the Race is Run for my liking. That's not me objecting to the language, so much as the overblown sentiment.

My Captain, please remember, Truth is One
And undivided and I cannot sing
A portion of the truth; there's no such thing.

That's just patently untrue. We all sing our portion of the truth.

It's a question of perspective. Yes, we all sing our portion of the truth, and in that sense truth is not "one."But if you're trying to tell the truth about a particular thing such as a relationship and its history, you can't do it by sugarcoating or leaving out the hard parts. In that sense, truth can't be told in portions.

"And that there's rather too much Fight the Good Fight and when the Race is Run for my liking. That's not me objecting to the language, so much as the overblown sentiment."

That's part of what I meant by the "smallness" of the modern approach to life. You're not supposed to think big, to express big emotions, to see the world as a heroic strugle, or else you're being melodramatic. It's not how I think.

Yes, I agree with Ros, the metre is very well handled. The trouble is that, once you've put your dad in a poem, he's not your dad any more - not to us readers. He's just a bloke in a poem, and we can only judge him by how he strikes us as readers. Consequently, any responses to the poem run the risk of being regarded as disrespectful to his memory. I hope you won't construe them like that.

In this case he appears to me - in his fictional guise only, you understand, not in any sense himself - as fairly unbelievable, something like a Marlborough Man as reimagined by Ayn Rand. That's probably completely unfair, but that's what the poem is telling me. Damned unreliable things, poems.

I do like the hints you give of his failings, as well as his strengths, but I think Ros has put her finger on something very telling - it is very Anglo-Saxon. You could be Beowulf's son.

Cheers

David

I'm comfortable with the idea of this poem as more of an epic panegyric than a psychological insight. And nothing anyone says here will be construed as disrespectful to my father's memory- all characters in poems are fictional even when they're not. The thing is, if you'd known him, he really was larger than life. Anyone who ever knew him would tell you the same. Of course, since you didn't know him, that doesn't matter- only the poem matters. But since I did know him, I couldn't imagine writing about him in any other way. He wasn't the Marlboro Man, but he sure wasnt a Woody Allen character either. And he didn't think much of Ayn Rand.

CSThompson wrote:He wasn't the Marlboro Man, but he sure wasnt a Woody Allen character either. And he didn't think much of Ayn Rand.

When you put it like that, CS, I like him already.

Trouble is, you know the background, but we don't. So just reading the poem, I'm getting a list of generalities - he was unreasonable in some aspect, you're trying not to pass that on to your children. I think it works for you but not for the uninitiated reader.

Ros