Blood Wedding
(for Madrid.)
Say it aloud. The town shakes like a morgue;
Man and blood lie divided by the purge.
Gather me in a pale moonlit gown, and I shall collect the dust, strewn by my night and your wondering.
I'm partial to this one too; just one sentence and it says so much.
Keep them coming drom
By the way, if you open a free email account with Yahoo, you will be able to store 100mg. You could send email to yourself and save all your lovely poems and thoughts on line.
Cartwheels
Lying the wrong side of the bed
She thinks of
Turning cartwheels in front of careless cars.
Not because of
Some wish to disappear in long,
Dark fountains, but in considering
The whole spectacle:
The grainy weather; the parted trees;
The drivers always busy doing nothing;
The spitting streaks of rain, and
Finally, the acrobat--
Her tresses like a fire's remains--
Enters and bounds
Off the diving board pavement.
Will the coming Pantheons
Give way? She jumps,
Fingers grazing the street like knife-edges,
Caught in the black land of a second's distance.
But don't stop posting here! I want to see more!
Wild stars awake
In pearl-drawn sky;
No heart weighs down
Those worn white spheres.
All things can burn,
Or fade to ash--
But you guide still
To poor, to rich.
M'aidez
Trudging through broken lines of hardened bones,
Dried up like raisins in the smoking sun
That never stops its sulkiness above:
This is not how those old, sprawled stories termed
Valour and honour; coiled up like stiff snakes,
Shrinking from fire, and from falling shells.
We see the bloodied truth of everything
Lain here: meek children, gun-tired, cowering
From looding garlands of white, blinding flames--
Holding their tarred arms out, crying m'aidez.
Drom, your writings hold so much romanticism and as you know that's the kind of poetry I like to read and write also. Keep posting.
As you know, dròm, I love short stories, and that one about Christmas Eve that you posted was just wonderful.
CB: I feel honoured that you would class me alongside yourself. I delighted in (sort of joint-) working alongside you, Edgar, Cav, Geligesti and others in the Spontaneous thread; perhaps we could revive it, when the summer fatigue starts to wean.
Smog: I am very glad that you enjoyed the story. It was written in a rush for a short story competition, here, on A2K, that never got off the ground. I have about fifty ideas for short stories, and many-- like the SP one-- that need finishing; hopefully, one day, I will get to these ideas, when the inspiration hits.
This is a small part of the Duke of Larisna's first soliloquoy... I have been writing a little play rather akin to a bastardized version of the Romances; anyway, part of the story is that he used to rule half of the islet, with his sister's uncomely husband owning the other half, Pasatia. The Duke of Pasatia raised up an army of four-hundred men and stormed Larisna, in which only about twenty lived. Most of the four-hundred men were supplied by the evil King of Balita, who wanted a presence on the island. Foolish Pasatia did not know that Balita would take all the island, eventually, for its rich silver. They stormed Larisna at night,-- but we don't know the details of it--; and the Duke was woken too late by his servants.
They took his daughter, Aurora, and where she had lain lay a pool of blood; so the Duke assumed the worst. The Duke was too busy looking for clues as to where they took his daughter's cadaver to raise an opposing army, and so Pasantia called himself king of the islet. Larisna is left with only his second daughter, an uncharming but compassionate and wily Agalia, (whom a servant of the 'King' of the islet would try to take later, who would also govern the island when Larisna had left) his worst but most loyal servant, Osman, and a tiny stretch of beach with a cove and a view of the thrashbearing sea. The story gets truly complicated, until the denoument in the end. Larisna is a flawed character, like all of them, but he is one of the most humane, even through his trauma.
I often like to sit upon the sea
And claim its expanse as my own. No one
Can taint its colour to a carcass-red,
Or burn its miles in savage love of wrecks.
How peaceful is the sea, even when wild,
And uniformly shows the sun at rise:
Never is it drowned in itself.
There, like a heathen to the night,
Upon your ragged face of moss,
The pale moon aches. No fire lights;
No shoulder's left to bear your loss.
And one last one, before I start pulling out more stupid ones...
Grandparents walked the halls by candlelight;
Each corner of each room recalled their trot.
The candles did not pacify the dark,
But rather added to it, with their slow
And wispy light, which rose above like smoke.
Some power fault had brought about the lack
Of manufactured light within the house.
A fire had stricken miles around, so we
Had to depend upon what they could find.
And they found candles from their wedding day.
Their faces, sponges of experience,
Seemed old as silk. The candles let me see
That each line crossing seemed to tell a tale--
Of dancing past their curfews in some barn;
Or courting loves who could have changed it all;--
Above all, what I saw in their vague streaks
Are two things: how they never would have thought
That youth, or youthful bliss, would slip from them:
They cut their cake; they crossed their Water; grinned
In photographs, just as the past built up
Into the case for their mortality.
The second thing was selfish, I suppose;
How their plight would unleash itself on me:
On all of us; whatever we may do.
We had to go: and by soft candle-light,
We left them to their wedding day, anew.
Very funny play, Drom! I really liked 'Wind Speech' too.
... I prefer the short ones too. I didn't know that Yahoo offered 100mb; unfortunately. I'll do that right now. 