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| saved Monday July 20, 2015 |
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #365 - Memory, a poem, Writerly Wednesday
Hi Mom, I didn't get this written on what is now yesterday, the date and time stamp of the entry for Wednesday, July 06 2016, one year to the day since I started this blog.
I had considered writing more end of a full year wrap up type stuff, so I delayed posting as I caught up on work and considered what I would share. But I have decided to maintain my schedule of special features with a poem on a Wednesday (at least until I run out) and a throwback photo on Thursdays. I will let the wrap up of my blog and its process leak out slowly or get featured in a different post soon. There's many other things going on now, too, so I may more to share on life changes soon as well.
I wanted to find a poem that was in some appropriate to mark this milestone and to you, Mom. As I have said before, doing this poem feature gets me reading poems that I have not read, looked at, or even thought about in many years.
This poem looks to be last touched back in 1993, when I was still serious about writing "literary" prose and poetry, the year a story of mine -- "600 Cows" -- was published in anthology of Michigan writers.
This poem came from an exercise I gave myself in responding to another poet's poem. Louise Bogan has a poem called "Memory," and so this is my response to that poem.
I could go find my book of Bogan's poems and probably find the inspiring poem and retype it, but this is a lot of work, and I don't think it illuminates my poem very much. In fact, if anything, putting a great poem by Louise Bogan here on this page with a mediocre poem by me would be depressing. And I have enough that is depressing already.
As always, my style shows that I am in love with language and the sounds of language, but maybe I cannot bring it all together with meaning and rhythm and lyric in a masterful way. However, I do like my use of nouns as verbs as in how memories "corner in cabinets" or how the bird "shoe boxes," which is meant to be more obviously noun turned verb than it is in my composition.
I think the poem has some lovely turns of phrase, but overall, it could use a major rewrite.
I wonder if your reading experience is improved by this honesty and commentary. :-)
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a poem by christopher tower
Do not knit your patch-works like bugs
Startling colors pinned to felt --
Curiosities, which once knew flight
In open skies, are now abandoned under glass.
Do not dress yesterday's scraps
With cape and fedora.
Do not ignore these visions
Like the dust conjured near baseboards,
Always seen, always remembered,
But never swept.
Time is a miser counting his collections
Behind the scenes of our every moment.
His treasures demand that you capitulate
And horde and save and scheme to survive.
Minute-by-minute these embroideries of time
Re-stitch their patterns. They never
Pile as blanched stones out-posting grassy
Hilltops, nor corner in cabinets full of colored
glass dishes from a time before childhood.
But they may take shape as a starling found
With a broken wing, taken to shoe box
By the radiator, and fed with a bottle
from a doll's play set, and one day returned
carefully to the wind like precious china
to the sideboard.
-1993
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Reflect and connect.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.
I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
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- Days ago = 367 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1607.06 - 10:10
NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.
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