PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I don;t even know how to: I don't even know how to adequately praise this highly evocative poem.  The imagery you convey is powerful and agile.  The short lines keep the eye moving from beginning to end, and that last stanza lets loose with a deluge of emotion.  This is a poem I would recommend to any student of poetry who wants to see a demonstration of "how it's done."

Thank you.  The scholars with: Thank you.  The scholars with whom I studied during my senior year in high school, and during my four undergrad years, were very demanding in their expectations of poetic excellence.  Later, I studied, on my own, both the poetry and the literary theory of J. V. Cunningham who believed that poetry was a verbal skill that required literate and intentional preparation.  Your are obviously more broadminded about poetry than I am, and I applaud you for it.  I am too set in my ways to change this late in my life.    What I resent most of all about this morning's incident, which is what led to the essay above, is being accused of failing my Faith by someone who does not share it, and seems to boast about not sharing it.  I will not keep silent for that.  I would never attempt to comment on a person's faith practice that I neither share nor understand; that is a breach of the most basic courtesy.   The demonstration of that rebuker's lack of credibility is that the rebuke was aimed at a fictive character reacting in duress to a fictive situation.  Should I, following the same example, question John Milton's Faith (or is knowledge of Matthew 7) because his version of Samson looks forward to offing a few hundred Philistine snobs?     What is ironic is that the rebuker accused me of failing Christ's directives in Matthew 7 because of words that I put into the mouth of a fictive character reacting under extreme duress to a fictive situation.  It began as a thought experiment:  if someone I knew had been murdered, what would I say, in sonnet form, to the murderer including a Dantesque sense of the crime's enormity---both in this world and the next.  It was, literally, just an excuse to try to turn a couplet into a quatrain and then into a sonnet.  That's all; and then, like a commode overflowing, suddenly that person's words were in the comment section rebuking a fiction, and was apparently not informed well enough to wonder if it was fiction or not.     That said, I am grateful for your comment.  Thanks for stopping by.

I always suspected Herodiade: I always suspected Herodiade was a bit of a stretch of the truth, but I definitely believed, verbatim, every telling mentioned in your second paragraph until mere seconds ago. Darn it. : )   I've shared my thoughts on this before, so I'll be shorter this time. Times change, and with that, what accounts for poetry shifts, as well. That is not meant to be a swift dismissal of your critique, though. Just a statement, that, within the fold, there may be some shifts that prove of a lasting value (wheat/chaff). I, myself, enjoy many of the sort of writings that you're thirsting for. It'd be nice to have more blended in with "reporter poetry", as you have coined it, but I do often appreciate the many other ways in which people express themselves here.   I always see people expressing themselves with a pen as a win. One of the best poems I ever read probably wasn't, from a literary standpoint, of particular quality. But my friend wrote it in during a moment when she was about to kill herself, and in doing so, she incidentally talked herself down off a ledge. As such, it's one of the better poems ever written. Most people aren't writing because they are suicidal, yet there is often something healthy in expressing the turmoil inside - much of these days a product of what we're absorbing from the outside - on paper. On that last point, I think we'd both agree.   Keep writing poetry in the manner you believe in it (and I'm sure you will). Inspire others to discover their inner John Milton ; )    

Thank you.: Thank you, both for your appreciation and for catching the paradox. It's funny how, engaged in any state for long enough - even being lost within 'what was lost' - the loop can become a honing beacon, a tether, a place to rest one's head. So familiar that it can become a settler's home.   I'm familiar with The Hollow Men, which is a really fantastic and standout work, even among Eliot's collection, so that is a quite generous and kind a comparison. Happy to know it brought to mind, for you, such greater work.

This is one of the most: This is one of the most powerful poems I have read recently, and I applaud your accomplishment  here.  The repetitions and variations on the "amber" phrases remind me of similar patterns in two of T. S. Eliot's poem, The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday.     I particularly like the last stanza in which you juxtapose the feeling of being lost with the strong assurance of the last two lines.  This is paradoxical, but that is the nature of poetry to be paradoxical.  This poem is excellent!

Not Fond: Of long passages repeated - you must really love those lines. "I'm still here" resounds over here. .~A~  .

If: A big word if. Magic potions for a time change - if. Pain and empathy, An if only write, do what can be done to ease what comes after. That and if are all we have. Wishing them wellness..  ~A~.