Confession time: I’ve been hoarding this one.
Long ago I promised to share my 100 Themes poems on this blog, even if they seemed publishable elsewhere. Since then, I’ve held a few back for personal reasons, when it seemed prudent to limit the audience. Other times — like now — I’ve held back because it seemed a waste not to submit them elsewhere.
That’s not a good attitude.
The point of this blog is to share my treasures, both bronze and gold, openly and freely.
I’ll still let my fiction incubate under the earth for a while — that’s part of my process, and I don’t believe in blogging stories except in rare circumstances. But 100 Themes poems are for sharing.
This one goes back two themes before Death and Pigeons at Dawn, as a response to the prompt
BLOOD
This was another theme that produced several false starts, most of them weird and unshareable.
The poem below came about when I was sitting in one of my favorite cafés, Kofemolka, and I happened to look up at the spiral staircase to the roof. The wheels in my head shifted a bit, then started turning.
A little drafting, a little revising, and voilà.
Look, My Bones
Look: my bones
are curling like staircases
up my spine.
Without blood
I’m strong and slender.
Without blood
my beauty draws the awe
from your mouth
as she spirals and spins
and gathers all
in her wind. I’m the still,
solid core
when nothing is left.
The bones
crack under your feet,
the beauty
crumbles, but you scale.
Your hand
on my core, you scale
to snow-eyed
peaks where the winds
blow dry
and the sky is silent.
You ask
my face, receive no answer.
Below you,
no way down.
Listen: my bones
were my voice, they spoke
as you climbed.
This is me,
when nothing is left.
This is me,
when at last you wish
to speak.
This poem came about in one of those rare, serendipitous moments of inspiration, when a familiar sight suddenly becomes strange.
When’s the last time you had such a moment? Tell me about it in the comments. 🙂
Beautiful poem, Randi! I read it twice just to savor it. Your imagery of bones and “snow-eyed peaks” painted cool grays and whites in my mind as I read. I love it when something familiar becomes strange to me all over again. It gives me a chance to learn it a second time and appreciate some new aspect about it. That sense of discovery is so thrilling. That happens a lot with languages–sometimes a word in a different language makes me realize that though a tree has been a tree all my life, it has been “arbre” to someone else and “albero” to still someone else just as familiarly. It’s so neat to see the world we know and hold dear through different eyes.
Yes! Or — maybe you know this feeling — when you repeat a word too many times in your head and suddenly it looks sounds foreign. This has happened to me more times than I can count. It’s a strange place to be in your mind. But a bit of “Verfremdung” (alienation) from the familiar can really be a seed of creativity. 🙂