By Anne Williston
~ words meant for reality ~

Yes, I’ve been writing every day, but I am not satisfied that what I have written is worth posting. I posted today’s poem on the PAD site, but I’ll put it here too. A response to the painting (title):

: Piazza d’Italia, by Giorgio de Chirico

His ears would have tilted back if not frozen in stone.

The late afternoon sun, slightly chill, barely warmed

his granite back. The men met politely,

avoiding the topic most on their minds.

So surreal, the green glow baking the earth.

No longer the color of life, but the reminder

of transcendent death, gripping the world in its teeth,

claws unsheathed to hold tightly. Slender hope.

Sliver of sanity out of view, while the world tilts

on its axis towards the dying star careening

towards our sun, a tail of comets twenty earths wide.

And they talk, “How is your wife?” and

“Do you think the market will go up?”

Screams of fear held at bay

by the platitudes of everyday.

The light grows as the sun lingers longer each day. Here in Michigan, I can only hope for an approximation of what we experienced when our family, en masse, visited my father’s birthplace. Oh, I long for the close-to-the-equator July days of Bornholm! Returning to Danmark in my mind, I recall the sun rising at 3 a.m. and setting sometime around 11 p.m. Somehow, we strayed into the evening, languorous but not tired, refreshed by the almost solid presence of light. Glorious, velvety ocean of light through which we swam each day.

With the explosion of internet publishing, poems are swooshing between websites like the classic Chutes & Ladders game.  Some climb carefully to the top, one rung at a time.  Other words are so  compelling they jump forward without stopping for breath!  The oft repeated, “but is it really poetry?” calls to mind debates repeated when major leaps in style or form occured.  I remember the first time I read Ezra Pound’s poem, “In a station of the Metro.”  It so excited me that I began to search for other similar writers.  I read the poem to one of my high school classes, which lead to a lively debate. Does it simply create an image or does it have mystery, the elusive, mystical poetic something so hard to define.  Is the image ever really so simple? What is it that helps build a bridge between the writer and the reader, allowing the creative process to develop? Luci Shaw, in the introduction to her book, The Angles of Light: New & Selected Poems, describes the process so well I feel my paraphrase mangles her well-phrased description of the process. Better to read the source, if you get a chance. Regardless, the access to poetry of all types is vast beyond our imagining.  The fields are ripe for harvest!  Time to gather the wheat and make it into bread.  Amen.