Poetry Forum

IN MEMORIAM: SILENCE

Wrap me in my chosen sounds,
and shape me a sarcophagus
of stone deaf days in which to lie,
there I may keep a wake a while
and celebrate remembered things:
larksong above a lonely hill,
still in a breathless morning summer,
flamenco horses that dance unseen
between the hedges of a country road,
owl-call along a moonlit night,
the slight complaint of elbowed pebbles
knocking in a bossy stream,
distant church bells on Sabbath days,
that faintly play a summoning.

I, sentimental, celebrate
every late and gentle voice
that decorated an old silence
that died beside a motorway,
beneath the glide-path of a ‘plane
under the volume of transistors.
Now wrap me in my chosen sounds
and shape me a sarcophagus
of stone deaf days in which to lie;
I will consider Orpheus
and mourn the death of silence.

Leslie,

Howdy, first and foremost.

I like your style, having read some of your other stuff to my pleasure and will probably comment on them in time.

Hmmmm....

I like the repeat of the sarcophagus bit, oddly enough it works well as a beginning and an ending. It reads a bit like a run-on though. I find myself having to pause in random places to take a breath, which mucks up the intended rhythm. "I, sentimental...." Great personalization...I think that indeed is you, which is refreshing. Other than that, very lush, very rich.

--A.S.

leslie

probably my favourite of the poems I have seen on this forum so far. I like the pleasant cohesiveness enabled by the poem's slight form, and recurrent images: you manage, with the motif of the sarcophagus, to remind us of the reverence we reserve for 'old silence'. I also admire the way you move between the calming register and unity which is the more 'traditional' domain of the natural poet

"larksong above a lonely hill,
still in a breathless morning summer"

and a more quirky, detached, possibly 'modern' mode of expression

"the slight complaint of elbowed pebbles
knocking in a bossy stream"

as if to perform for us the replacement of old sound with new noise by bracketing in one poem the staples of each style (if it isn't too trite to consider terms as vague as 'traditional' and 'modern' in opposition, or even as 'styles' at all).

nice work.

pb

Thanks Abs and pb. Good to get encouragement at times. Comments appreciated. Sometimes we know our own poems so well we fail to see the weaknesses.

Leslie,

This is a great poem, seems people are very taken with the Ancient Greeks!

AS and PB have summed it up far more succinctly than I could, so I'll just say I enjoyed it muchly.

very nice, rich and textured with vibrent Recollections of sound. Beautifully painted

Hi. I'm not what you would call a good critic. I read a poem and it either does something for me or it doesn't. To me, good and bad poetry is simply poetry that I like or don't.
And I like this one. I haven't analysed why - I just know that to me it was a very good and enjoyable read. I hope I'll find lots more on this forum as good as this.

Terry

im with terry. and it took 3 years of an english degree to make me see that! a good poem stones me to my soul to quote the great van morrison. and i just want to let it run all over me like this one does.
thanks leslie
des
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