Here frowns your desiccated skin,
flesh-divorced, withered from small cues,
where once our wet reposed.
Here draws its owner to his own
sallowed remorse, a dull, cold home,
away to lone alone.
Here dries repeating drop by drop,
a fanciful and naive hope,
by nail, by hook, by hoop,
a female bitterly deposed.
In sail-less, sheet bound grief we've stalled,
despising all we chose.
Naught can you wash when stone is shored.
Friction tides attempts to crimped ghost-loam.
The time is spoiled past soil.
Where bleached your lace-proud presence roils
a story, linen-pocked and shed
to restless bed retombed.
Slick as a faceless oil this mark
shall spread as nothing may remove
holes caused by feckless loss.
There shall be darns where stitches tacked.
There shall be moths instead of vows
till all our tares be sewed.
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3 comments:
AnnMarie,
I liked the internal rhyme so often present in this poem and the pristine tone. Very rare. Very enjoyable.
peace,
nancy.
Nancy
Thank you for the feedback. I did an analysis of Thomas' poem and tried to make the meter the same. But it's still quite hard even though we're schooled in his work. To fully appreciate his work I think the best thing is to google Richard Burton (the actor) reading Dylan Thomas. And to understand something of the Welsh language - although he wrote in English. I'm lucky as yesterday I was in conversation with someone from Merthyr Tydfil - a small town in Wales where there is quite a distinct accent. To understand Welsh a little more go here: http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/fun/welsh/home.html and you'll see that in part it's like trying to learn Cantonese. In fact I think there are more words from Russian in British English than there are words from the Welsh and much has been written about why there is such an historic divide. But when the Welsh speak English they sing it if you see what I mean and they pronounce every consonant. In Welsh they don't have all the consonants we do in English but they have inflections that we don't. Thomas had the sound of Wales in his poetry. His poetry is far more fluid than I could ever write. I don't have the ear for it. In this response I notice my consonants are harsh. I did haggle with myself over that initial 'skin' on the end of line 1 but I decided to keep it so that that beginning 'till' on the final line had an image of itself and as I couldn't make the wonderful Welsh watery sounds in my English head I went for hard instead. I went for the content too - being about a dried stain instead of the waters of the face. I've read it several times in what I can pass off as a Welsh accent but haven't the guts to audio it as I would probably cause offence to any Welsh listeners!!
Loved the ending line especially. It does have a wonderful rhythm to it.
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