08-11-2025, 07:37 AM
"I've wept too many tears, heartbreaking dawns"
I have read too many words,
so many that I can no longer see them.
They blur together, inadequate.
They stand naked in the storm,
puckered flesh no defense
against the wall of lead and steel.
This first part can be excused for its mixed elements, as that's what it's talking about. And needn't be excused.
Words stirred together
like so many battered pigments,
‘til mixed to the ancient smear,
the old blood hue that we all know
brown and unremarkable,
never to be as sharp
as the shrapnel that
cuts across the landscape
from east to west,
and back again.
Destruction and death are weaved in maybe too subtly. And would be just right, with more memorable phrasing or an apparently minor word removed or a more suggestive one added here and there.
Could build on the concrete (in both senses) aspects, though the disparate concrete imagery from stanza to stanza isn't a problem and adds to the poem.
Take the conscious or unconscious or unaware allusions before and after the poem as you will. Others will too when they read poems.
The old man's scythe
drones back and forth,
back and forth,
‘til all the words,
those useless words
are cut to pieces,
crushed under the cheap concrete rubble,
dazed, broken, forgotten,
lying weeping on the floor.
"I'm cold and I'm shamed
lying naked on the floor"
I have read too many words,
so many that I can no longer see them.
They blur together, inadequate.
They stand naked in the storm,
puckered flesh no defense
against the wall of lead and steel.
This first part can be excused for its mixed elements, as that's what it's talking about. And needn't be excused.
Words stirred together
like so many battered pigments,
‘til mixed to the ancient smear,
the old blood hue that we all know
brown and unremarkable,
never to be as sharp
as the shrapnel that
cuts across the landscape
from east to west,
and back again.
Destruction and death are weaved in maybe too subtly. And would be just right, with more memorable phrasing or an apparently minor word removed or a more suggestive one added here and there.
Could build on the concrete (in both senses) aspects, though the disparate concrete imagery from stanza to stanza isn't a problem and adds to the poem.
Take the conscious or unconscious or unaware allusions before and after the poem as you will. Others will too when they read poems.
The old man's scythe
drones back and forth,
back and forth,
‘til all the words,
those useless words
are cut to pieces,
crushed under the cheap concrete rubble,
dazed, broken, forgotten,
lying weeping on the floor.
"I'm cold and I'm shamed
lying naked on the floor"