You had some excellent: You had some excellent inspiration and your offspring has all the resplendent craftsmanship of a classic love poem and all the allure of a drama.
Your innovative twist is your high-impact focus on invaded privacy, the "voyeur's curse", that intruded upon one of the most important firsts in a person's life, or, in your shrewd words, a "perfect abyss", an "inexperienced intensity". With impressive skill you conveyed the envy of the killjoys.
We're left wondering how beautiful the story would have ended if the young lovers had been left alone. And yes, as Starward noted, there is a strong undercurrent of Shakespearean tragedy.
A powerful angle on a timeless theme. Excellent, as always.
I thoroughly enjoyed your: I thoroughly enjoyed your endearing, down-to-earth and nostalgic portrait of a different sort of hero: the everyday fixture in our lives who brings a bit of joy, if only for a short while in small ways, and in the case of Old Pearl, in the form of the familiar "grease truck" (I take it there were no vegan options for strange people like me ).
I had to smile at your clever swipe at gentrification: How an authentic "roach coach" serving "hungry plebes" back then is now something hijacked by the suits and the fashionable because "Anthony Bourdain rode in/ and glamorized food trucks" that had, until then, "barely evolved from the chuckwagon".
You did a superb job bringing Pearl and the old days (not always good, but strangely missed) to life. A pleasure to read.
My first impression of this: My first impression of this poem was a sense of Shakespeare's adolescent lovers, Romeo & Juliet. Any poem that presents some aspect of them is, by that association, beautiful.
Here waiting for the new: Here waiting for the new minting of coins and paper bills. Those of course and every other thing that this new reign will bring. That including music and talents.
Thank you for those kind: Thank you for those kind words. The grandeur of your Poetry towers over this site the way the sun towers of the earth; and, like the sun, it brings light, warmth, and sustenance wherever it shines. We do not thank the sun; I doubt most people ever really think about the sun. But I need to thank you for the quality of your verbal skill, and the great delight it has brought to me over these past three years; hence, this sonnet, small but sincerely offered in good Faith.
Even if this wasn't a: Even if this wasn't a generous and highly valued gift from a connoisseur of words, I would honestly say that the artistic merit of your sonnet is supreme. It has your distinctive splendor flowing through every line and each line is a triumph. Vintage Starward and masterfully opulent.
Groping for words now . . . Silenced in humble gratitude.
I shall be forever grateful: I shall be forever grateful to you for allowing me to fulfill my early, undergraduate ambition of watching the expansion of the work of a Poet of such grandeur. Studying the work of Eliot and Stevens, and then, later, Vergil, allowed me to gain some experience in "observing," so to speak. But their work was already complete, and their time on earth ended; nothing more would be added. The only metaphor I can think of is an astronomer studying the last, residual glows of dead stars; no more light will emerge, because the fusion has expired and the core has grown cold.
Then, decades later, when I was still in such despair after this medical disability sunk its teeth into me, random browsing brought me to your Poetry. I figured out two things fairly rapidly (even for a dolt like me): that the cosmic grandeur of your vision is "off the charts," in the finest way; and that the expanding totality of your Poetry could provide that which the deceased Poets could never have provided. I am convinced of your greatness, and of the long future of your Poetry that I will not be around to see (but that is the natural order of things). To be able to comment upon it, as it expands and resonates across PostPoems, is both a privilege (for the obvious reasons) and a challenge (to formulate a response in the presence and power of such verbal accomplishment). Your Poetry brings to completion the processes that I learned as an undergrad, but could never, at that time, see in real time; it was always an examination of what were, essentially, relics and fossils; or the shadowy masses of long dead stars. Your Poetry has changed, and improved, and vivified all that for me. Thus, the privilege of commenting is one for which I will---in this temporary life, and in the eternal life ahead---be ever grateful.
Starward
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