out on the bay kite surfers, tankers no smoke haze yet heat dome early days
two Canada geese pose for an Instagram shot necks extended rod taut
at their feet a gosling
proud parents they bob their heads like ageing rock stars
Brendan and Sherry , the creators of the now defunct earthweal have a new website. It’s called Desparate Poets
Check them out!
This Sherry’s challenge:
What makes you feel desperate where you live? What is changing? What is being lost? How is “Progress” making inroads on your landscape, and how do you feel about it? Give us a snapshot. It can be as broad as a seascape, a desert, a teeming city. Or it can be the opposite: finding comfort in the beauty around us, whether it is as vast as the sky or as small as a dew-covered spider-web, on a cornstalk by the back fence in the early morning.
The moon hung
like a searchlight
in the spangled sky
and we hung
out on
the deck.
A Whiter Shade of Pale
By the time ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ was recorded in 1967, Bob Dylan had already raised the bar very high in terms of what the public expected from a song lyric; song writers were now expected to be poets. This was a heavy load to carry as few songwriters had Bob’s poetic gift; as a result, bathos was everywhere.
Bathos: “an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous”.
There are, as I said, many examples from that era, but the one that always stands out in my mind is from the last four lines of the first verse of ” A Whiter Shade of Pale”:
The room was humming harder
as the ceiling flew away
when we called out for another drink
the waiter brought a tray.
I have to admit that when I first heard this song I had no idea what it was about. Why are sixteen vestal virgins leaving for the coast? What is a vestal virgin anyway? Who is the miller? I still don’t know, but I don’t think it really matters. It’s best to sit back, listen to the song and let your brain feed on the images and in no time at all the room will hum harder, the ceiling will fly away, you’ll think about maybe following the vestal virgins, you’ll skip a light fandango, turn cartwheels across the floor, all the time trying to avoid that waiter and his tray.
Notes:
The recorded version of the song has only two verses, but if you google the lyrics you will find four verses. Procol Harum sometimes included the extra verses in live performances but wisely left them out of the recording; they are not very good and diminish the song’s impact. As Bob Seger once sang:
Well those drifters days are past me now I’ve got so much more to think about Deadlines and commitments What to leave in, what to leave out
Bob Seger, ‘Against the Wind’
“What to leave in, what to leave out” – whether you are writing a song, poem, novel, short story, if you can solve that one you might be on the way to something good!
ee
cummings
cummings
ee
typeset tyrant
champion
of the
lower case
thank you
for showing
me
that
poetry
could
be
about more
than
dead heroes
fairies
and bogs.
plus a bonus poem in which Slim escapes the 3 syllable shackles of slimverse and displays an uncharacteristic lightness of being.
The Low November Sun
The low November sun
hits the silver birches
and the cherry tree
sending the bush tits
and the black-capped
chickadees
into a flitting frenzy
Who pulled the alarm?
Which one is my nest?
Where did I leave that worm?
Both poems have appeared in other posts, this combination was prompted by the Daily Prompt – ‘branch’.
Stopdraggingthepanda 