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Thread: A Daily Journey

  1. #1
    mjd888 is offline Fun and felicitous PFFA patron
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    A Daily Journey

    1. Below

    2. The Forest

    3. The Memory Game

    4. Dirt

    5. The Rope

    6. The Complete Death

    7. Day

    8. Toys

    9. Bully

    10. Two Hands

    11. Wait

    12. The Stone

    13. Leaving

    14. A Mouse

    15. Green Tea

    16. Pigeon Chest

    17. Translation of a poem by Masaoka Shiki

    18. Monkey

    19 + 20. One Handed + River

    20 - 26. Bowerbird, Dead Bell, Reliquary, Wooden Man, Cliff, Bawcock

    27 - 28. Subtractions, Flowers

    Rain


    A thunderclap, its opaque boom.
    And then the first few drops of rain.
    They rattled on the cage around my room,
    And in their rising noise, they made it bloom,
    That flower of being alive, no claim
    On anything but this black drop of time.
    And as it played the window's drum,
    The churning river washed the grease and slime
    Of memory that clogged my mind,
    That trammelled up the flow of now. That thrum
    Of water falling down
    Was all there was to hear. In the whole town --
    I strained to hear beyond the roar -- it was all sound:


    No couples shouting in the street,
    Or engines wailing overhead.
    No globs of spit, or scraps of incomplete
    And random screams that chase a flock of feet.
    Instead, the silence of the dead,
    If silence is a noise so lucid, clear
    And uniform it shows the flood
    Of plasma coursing through your ear,
    And in its constancy, cleans fear
    As you forget your sprinting heart, and would
    Be happy now to sink
    Into the gathered rain, the pooling ink
    That could expunge the din of blood in one cold drink.
    Last edited by mjd888; 04-30-2014 at 06:21 PM. Reason: Lost formatting when pasted

  2. #2
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    good to see you doing napo mj! good opener, too. nice sounds in this, good images, too. good stuff.

  3. #3
    merelynn is offline Fun and felicitous PFFA patron
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    Happy NaPoMo!

  4. #4
    mjd888 is offline Fun and felicitous PFFA patron
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    Hi Cookala

    Thank you very much; i'm very excited to be doing it! Trying to index now...

    Matthew

  5. #5
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    Hi Matthew,

    Nice to see you take the plunge. The overwhelming envelope of rain drowning out all other sounds. Impressive that you've kept the rhyme scheme going. I find rhyming hard when I'm in a hurry.

    Have a great month!


  6. #6
    Speug is offline Likes to pretend he's Image Indifferent
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    I think we've just had the hottest day of the year where I live. That thunderstorm sounds pretty good.

  7. #7
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    You're off to a thundering start on your journey. Enjoy your first NaPo!



  8. #8
    mjd888 is offline Fun and felicitous PFFA patron
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    Thank you Speug, new leaf, Merelynn and Matt for your comments and images. They were very encouraging, and the images were inspiring. I'm very much looking forward to reading all of your work in the coming month.

    Cheers

    Matthew

  9. #9
    mjd888 is offline Fun and felicitous PFFA patron
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    The Forest


    I snap another branch. It gives like bone.
    But the snow doesn't echo back the sound:
    Soft pines stand watchfully, uncracked, ungroaned
    By wind; their packs of snow muffle the ground
    After they slip from branches. Here, I walk
    Almost each day, in summer, hear song thrushes
    At dawn or dusk, and spring, thumb clumps of snowdrops,
    Their fragrant stalks,
    Skin-smooth against the mud, and autumn, brush
    My shoes along a skein of rotten leaves.


    But now it's winter: as the light unwinds
    Into a coil of dark, I breathe the stillness,
    The linen scent of virgin snow, that blinds
    Us to the black beneath its silences.
    My son, they say, is out here. Last seen slung
    Over a shoulder like a sack of beets,
    Being heaved into a nameless, markless patch
    Of ground. My tongue
    Went dry as those fricatives and plosives seeped
    Into my skull: son gone; unknown; can't catch.


    So here I am. Having a look, I muttered
    To my wife before I clicked the lock
    And headed out this dusk, past struck dumb gutters,
    And slushed, expectant driveways scabbed with tarmac,
    Hedgerows concealing broken nests, and trees,
    Leafless and quiet sentinels for paths
    That lead past gritted roads to the wood's edges.
    I cannot ease
    Past brushed up leaves, past cans from cars, past chaff
    Still tangled in the grass from last year's sedge.


    Instead, I stride across that line where wood
    Meets road, and march right in to look for...what?
    A gold and errant hair, beached in the mud
    And fur of frost around a stream? A knot
    Of sobs unspooling from inside a vine,
    Or sylvan grotto carved into a knoll
    By frantic fingers. Maybe footprints, half
    The size of mine,
    Raised where the arch should be, around the ball
    Smooth and compact? Perhaps, in bark, a carved


    Bright pillar of an I, a bow of U,
    Or arrow of a heart? No, not one mote
    Of evidence, or slither of a clue,
    To point the way, or break the news. I float
    From trunk to copse to loam like a snow flake,
    And think of his small weight, my clavicle
    Abruptly bending like a gale blown sapling;
    I had to shake
    Or jolt, or jink, the powder from his still
    Hot back before I laid him down, the wrapping


    I bound him with crinkling against the fresh
    And open wound of dirt in the cleared drift.
    I can admit to you, dumb forest. Flesh
    And blood was not enough to skew the sift
    Of here and there, the fine heft of my fist
    That struck him as he turned: an argument,
    Solved by...I'll ask for the forgiveness of
    The snow, the forest
    In the snow, and snow that binds the blent
    And brackish vapour in the sky. Love


    Was not enough to make me give it up,
    The soft somatic shade I buried here,
    Here, beneath this rod straight pine, this dip
    Of loam, beside this rigid stream. However
    Often it keeps me coming back, I can't
    Admit this plot of dirt is something I'd
    Be willing to disturb, disrupt, disband.
    This isn't cant
    To make a wrong a right, but thoughts applied
    To a young problem, sleeping in the sand.

  10. #10
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    Nice use of rhyme. The rhythm is loose and has a casual feel.

    BrianIs AtYou
    I think I think, therefore I might be.

  11. #11
    merelynn is offline Fun and felicitous PFFA patron
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    Hi Matthew,

    Very vivid images - well done.

    And in their rising noise, they made it bloom,
    That flower of being alive, no claim
    On anything but this black drop of time.


    This was lovely.

    I also liked the description of pines 'ungroaned/By wind' in 'The Forest' (I have a bunch of Loblollies in the back yard and they do complain when it's windy). 'The linen scent of virgin snow, that blinds/Us to the black beneath its silences' is terrific as well.

  12. #12
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    These first two, but particularly the second, set up a mood and scene very well with sound and image. The second was especially nice (in a dark way) with its unexpected ending.

  13. #13
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    "Rain" had some hypnotic sounds, from the repeated rhymes I think. I really enjoyed the image ending in "flow of now".

    As for "The Forest", several images stood out from the dark background, especially "my clavicle/Abruptly bending like a gale blown sapling". That same hypnosis is present here, in the rhythm and the sounds.
    "Everywhere I go I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
    There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher". --Flannery O'Connor

  14. #14
    Speug is offline Likes to pretend he's Image Indifferent
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    Murder already - and we're only two days in! This was another really atmospheric poem, and the metre rolls along really nicely, I think.

  15. #15
    mjd888 is offline Fun and felicitous PFFA patron
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    Hello everybody, thank you very much for your very encouraging comments. Apologies for taking on such an unseemly subject so soon. Too many northern european crime dramas.

    Many thanks again

    Matthew

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