About Poetry in the Supermarket

[Brownlie]

Bad meter....


I spied a placard painted here (there?)
(A)amidst the pandered fruits. (pandered?)
A blushing apple rendered cartoon (cartoonish?)
(B)by yellow bus-like flutes. (How are flutes bus like?)

I can speak of grass-roots, one that seems
(T)to grow from wicker bowls,
(A)and mushroom cartoon jubilee(s)
(T)that turns to wholesale gold.

The other sprouts in puny leaves, (what others?)
(A)and seeks to make a whole. (a whole what?)
The placards signal dollar signs, (are they using morse code to signal the dollar signs?)
(A)and artifice the soul. (artifice is a noun only, there is no adjectival form, it would be equivalent to sating "and car the soul".)

The other looks beneath his sole, (who is "the other")
And binds us to his boot.
I curse the magic father now
Beholding missive roots.

However, I fear the abstract
Demon who winds with words,
And billows out a dragon’s pall
To choke the yearning herds.

Sorry, I followed the first parts (somewhat), but the last two stanzas bypass me completely. I suppose I could guess at a meaning, but I am not in the guessing game. How the last two lines relates to the supermarket is a mystery to me.


Dale

Thank you for reading and commenting. You bring up some valid points especially about the noun. I got a little carried away with the references again. The other would be Walt Whitman. The two grassroots would be the hippy movement and Leaves of Grass. The poet writing the supermarket poetry wrote speeches for the Blue Meanies and Walt Whitman sought to unify a diverse group of people in Leaves of Grass. I call Whitman the magic father, because his solution was both male centered and magical. With the signal business I was attempting to make some statement about semiotics, or something that probably didn't work too well. The last stanza refers to the faerie queen and the dragon/serpent in the scriptures. The idea of language being polluted has been done in poetry before, but it probably did not work too well here. The point is that they are taking the profound associations with poetry to produce little jingles to post in the supermarket and sell things. Well that's probably more than you want to read . I'm not sure how I feel about making political statements either though I suppose it doesn't matter as this poem will never be anthologized. Thanks again for reading the mish mash I've posted here.