Here is an ode for you, my dear
to celebrate your ferric heart
and an idiocy of intimacy
as valueless as modern art.
Here is a pot of chrysanthemums
with viper heads on every stem
to commemorate the quacks you quote
and your absolute belief in them.
Behold the cradle that holds the child
who turned to fog before she cried
and the trivia you cared for more
than the funeral or the fact she died.
Who holds the torch and crosses eyes
at you in imaginary dance?
You, the center of the world
departing now by ambulance?
We were once and once was us
in kinder intervals that fell
into the ditch like cur and bitch
chasing cast-iron kites through Hell.
________
for Word Garden Word List--Hapax
I like it quite a bit...
ReplyDelete"Behold the cradle..." really speaks to me. Dark times. "Chasing cast iron kites through hell." A powerful pen.
ReplyDeleteWhat a powerful poem - it sings of redemption and overcoming. A real battle cry in rhyme and reason - Jae
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to imagine how this could be more perfect. Each stanza is full of condensed and vivid images, stringently rhymed, but never rigid, reinforcing a rock-like feeling of inevitability, a pronouncement that absolutely defines even as it displaces and realigns lies, events and feelings in a cadenced progression to that final judgement that has the bare whiff of a nostalgia under the brimstone of its justice. I especially like "..idiocy of intimacy..; and "..the child
ReplyDeletewho turned to fog.." Very potent skiprope spellsong, Shay.
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ReplyDeleteWonderfully dark imagery! The ending is especially chilling!
ReplyDelete"Behold the cradle that holds the child
ReplyDeletewho turned to fog before she cried
and the trivia you cared for more
than the funeral or the fact she died."
This stanza just floored me, emotionally and in its poetic mastery of imagery, rhythm and rhyme. It marches so ruthlessly across the page leaving a devastation of the heart in its wake, much like the "you" of the poem. To me, the clause, "who turned to fog before she cried," speaks of the trauma experienced before the child even realized what she was enduring, where she herself was immaterial, made to exist in someone else's narcissistic hell, slowly disappearing. You would have to have a heart of stone not to weep for this child, wishing "the kinder intervals" had been lasting rather than a pause between
"cur and bitch
chasing cast-iron kites through Hell."
I love the rhyme and how potent each stanza is with imagery and feeling Shay! My favorite is the second to last one that also holds some word play too! Simply amazing my friend! If great poems were money, you would be a millionaire!!!!
ReplyDeleteYou know, rhyming poetry is not my favourite - though I do like the occasional rhyme chiming in - but you take it to another level. I love these lines:
ReplyDelete"an idiocy of intimacy
as valueless as modern art"
And the third stanza is haunting. But of course it is, you wrote it.