What passed for conversation while we drank,
sounds of turned pages, steps of passers by,
punctuated pauses deep and dank.
Good humour gave up last attempts to fly.
Tin-caged canaries fell but we ignored
their clatter, being in ourselves engrossed
in separate heavy silences. I’m bored.
Some Stay a Little Longer sounds get tossed
from memory to ear and out of mind.
Black beetles eating dark things in the night
tune up for dirges live canaries find
abhorrent. Nothing going on goes right.
Stay, but where? A mystery to me.
I wonder when life happens where I’ll be.
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September Song - notes on revising from original to revision 1
Ros, ablackfoot, and JJ,
Thank you all for your help seeing where this poem needs improvement. Here is the revised version together with some notes trying to answer your questions.
I gave this poem the title ‘September Song’ because it was September when I drafted it, and also because I was reflecting on how a year compares to a person’s life span. Kurt Weil’s famous song of the same title uses that metaphor. Imagine Frank Sinatra singing: ‘… May to December…’
Here in Holland, the first of September brought rain and a drop in temperature, a warning of early, hard winter both literally and figuratively? When canaries in their tin cages fell dead from their perches, miners knew to evacuate the mine, and I am alluding to that, but ‘we’ in the poem — busy with ‘ourselves’ — ignored the warnings.
Another song: Through the magic of Google I today learned that the Brothers Osborne’s ‘Stay a Little Longer’ is one of ‘country music’s hottest new acts’. I didn’t know that. Wishing for summer to stay a little longer, I was not referring to that song, nor to the earlier ‘Stay All Night, Stay a Little Longer’ sung by Willy Nelson. What I was half remembering was ‘Stay Just A Little Bit Longer' or 'Stay' — the doo-wop song recorded by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs. Like, especially like, Rosemary Butler sings beginning at minute 6:15 on YouTube https://youtu.be/EJgKNHYqVoc
Thanks to your comments I have changed the poem’s ‘from Spotify to us and overboard’ line to ‘from memory to ear and out of mind’. This not only avoids over-topically mentioning Spotify (a digital music service providing access to millions of songs) but lets me correct the overboard/wears rhyming error.
I had removed and reinserted ‘and’ in line 10 ‘and I wonder when life happens where I’ll be’ five or six times before posting the earlier version here. It’s out again in this revision. I can’t find a reason for it either except that sometimes it sounds good
JJ, I too would like to see my scan on line 6, but thanks to you I see that making it scan the way it was written requires squealing the ‘we' — Does the revised line scan properly now?
Black beetles are creepy/ominous if you watch them and imagine them getting big or militant. Common Black Ground Beetles in America live in dark places and hunt nocturnally, running to catch aphids, caterpillars and other soft-bodied prey. The black beetles I was remembering seeing in France (les petits coléoptères, au corps arrondi et noir avec des reflets métallisés) feed on droppings and decaying organic matter. The bored ‘I’ figure listens in the silence and hears or imagines them vibrating, threatening to come out from cover.
September Song - revision 1 (6 September 2015)
They passed for conversation while we drank:
the sounds of pages turning, passers by.
We acted peacefully but something shrank
and, when I dropped my glass, it tried to fly.
Tin-caged canaries fell but we ignored
their clatter, being at that time engrossed
inside each other’s silences. I’m bored.
Some Stay a Little Longer sounds get tossed
from memory to ear and out of mind.
I wonder when life happens where I’ll be.
Leaf-decked black beetles eat dark things they find
I hear, in our new silence, how they key
their vibrations to a volume I can hear
enough that boredom yields that bit to fear.
September Song - original
They passed for conversation while we drank:
the sounds of pages turning, passers by.
We acted peacefully but something shrank
and, when I dropped my glass, it tried to fly.
Tin-caged canaries fell but we ignored
their clatter as if we were too engrossed
inside each other’s silences. I’m bored.
Some Stay a Little Longer sounds get tossed
from Spotify to us and overboard,
and I wonder when life happens where I’ll be.
In autumn grass, black beetles hawk new wares.
I hear, in our new silence, how they key
vibrations to a volume I can hear
enough that boredom yields that bit to fear.
