Poems have many ways of presenting themselves to me.
Sometimes they wait patiently for me to discover them ... and am I ever surprised ... because they've been there all the time ... I just hadn't noticed until now.
Sometimes they almost literally leap out at me. Some event, some thought sets them into motion ... and they're often so fragile ... so like the smoke from an evening fire ... that I have to capture them quickly on paper, or they're gone ... gone forever.
I remember exactly where I was when this poem leaped out at me.
I was walking alone, east on Wayne Avenue, just a block west of Smithville. Something glinted in the early-morning sky, and I paused to stare at it. It was a plane ... just a tiny speck on that deep, deep blue blanket of sky.
When I got back home, I sat at the kitchen table, as was my custom then, and started writing. The result, after many revisions (that process of slowly boiling it down to its very essence):
MORNING FLIGHT
Great silver-gray fish
gliding silently
across the cold blue
of morning
toward that huge red
bait of a sun,
passengers settled
in your slender belly,
flying away
from earthbound creatures
just stirring awake,
waiting for the sun
to begin reaching
toward them, too.
©
1998(originally published in Midwest Poetry Review)
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Today's word:
essenceAfterthoughts ... in response to your comments:
Oh (blush-blush), thank you for those comments, Southernmush. As I say, over and over, so much depends on what the reader brings to the poem ... Me? I just take ordinarysubjects and try to see them in a different way ... like a youngster might, on seeing them for the first time. I'm no youngster, of course, so that takes practice ... and, sometimes, a lot of tweaking, polishing, reworking, to get a poem to say what I really want it to ... then, like a youngster with a newly found object, I try to find someone so I can show them and share it.
1 comment:
Hello Mr. Brimm
I have to say that your poem "Morning Flight" is so descriptive. You have a way of saying things in a poem that the words come alive for the reader. I like how you wrote about the plane as a "Great silver-gray fish - gliding silently - across the cold blue - of morning"
You always help me to see things in a totally new way. I want to say that I also like reading your thoughts before you share your poems. You are more than a writer you are part teacher for us readers. Thanks again Mr. Brimm for being at J-Land
Take care and have a great Sunday
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