As he crossed the road the man he saw
Was he real the man so old and haggard
Of what did he dream was it shock and awe
Did he imagine, this old man, this laggard
The sweeping lines of time twisting
Bent out of shape defying rhyme
Did he ever want to stop climbing
Or was he content to bide his time
And the man when he saw the boy
Did he wonder what lay in store
What dreams and hopes might have that boy
A life waiting to hear the lion roar
Working and striving to do what he can
Was the man the boy or the boy the man?
(a poem about the future in the form of a sonnet with a hint of chiasmus for writing 201 – future)
the west gate
confronts an evil concentration
will they become russian dolls
shaped by diagonals
etched from broken glass
screaming out keep out
or just give me enough rope!
will we take the right path?
(found poetry featuring landscape and a little enumeratio for wordpress writing 201 – landscape)
*shot with nikon d700, 16-35mm f/4 lens, edited in aperture 3, silver efex pro 2, diverging paths intersect*
Notes and queries
During the last couple of weeks I have been participating in the Writing 201 Poetry course under the expert guidance and watchful eye of Ben Huberman.
Each day Ben has set us a new challenge including a word prompt, a poetic form and a device.
Today’s challenge involves responding to the word “landscape” using the found poetry form and the device of enumeratio.
My response, a piece of flagrant and unashamed self promotion 😉, is to use a landscape shot I took in the Spring of 2012 at Ada Huja, a long disused site on the banks of the Danube in Belgrade which also serves from time to time as the site for the Supernatural music festival. I used this shot for a number of reasons . Firstly because it is one of the few landscape shots I have in my archive and second because it is one of my favourite images to be found in the first edition of my book belgradestreets which featured photos drawn from my blog of the same name.
I then selected ten captions (in bold) placed beneath every second photo in my book leading up to and ending with the caption from the photo I chose to construct today’s “found” poem.
Cold, icy, fingers, reaching out, twisted, full of avarice, tainted with malice. Clawing, prying, like lice. Sure in purpose, disturbing, exposing, dealing in deceit. Touched unseen by fingers, trice unexpected, so uninvited. Wait. Crisis averted, like an oasis, those fingers are not
real
(for wordpress writing 201 – fingers, a prose poem about fingers with added assonance)
These words, from Rainer Maria Rilke, once shared with me at a time when I felt empty and without hope, are simple yet compelling.
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
The image I chose to use today comes from a shoot in a famous cemetery that I shared recently on belgianstreets, the words seem to fit both the expression in the eyes of this dead wartime warrior, and the feelings of those he left behind.