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Poetry Magnum Opus

In Anticipation of Fall's Colors


dr_con

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In Anticipation of Fall's Colors

 

Why do we go to cemeteries

expecting to encounter the Dead?

 

Today it rains

two years ago another September

it didn’t stop

 

The thoughts of flooding

makes those who were there

uneasy reliving

 

past as if it were now

 

We’re more likely to run into them

walking around outside

iron fenced designations isolated

 

to fallible memories

 

Right here where yesterday the season’s

last tomatoes glowed red in the sun

and the blue slide of the previous owner’s

swingset provided a cheerful background

to the promise of eternal cornucopia

 

now shrouded in raindrops

masking the immediacy of last night's thunder

 

One sees them playing in glorious folly

Swinging and swinging climbing and whooping

echoing actions through Spring’s forever promises

 

Their absence

an absolute presence.

 

 

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Your first and last two lines work extremely well with the sandwiched imagery of past and present.. I liked “ fallible memories” and the reflections on time and life that always seem more profound in autumn than any other season. Enjoyed. G.

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Their absence

an absolute presence.

 

Oh, applicable to SO many aspects!

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Yes, 'tis the season - the season of dying.

At least it seems that way in the north where the winter's prospects are not so welcome to those who after many seasons are sick and tired of the challenge.

 

I don't have much time for cemeteries and find them rather bizarre, if not morbid, collections of stones, but I do frequent local ones for the winter bird count. I hope not to be put in one.

 

Better that we kept a public book of personalities and deeds to assuage that fallibility of memories, and the presence of absence?

 

Not that I didn't enjoy your poem . . .

from the black desert

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Thanks DC & Gate. Yes I'm still getting used too, again 'Seasons' on the East coast- After 25 years in the Nor Cal Bubble, It has been a challenge;-) I see cemeteries here as easily accessible parks, they are walkable in all directions fro here. My partner hates them, caught in their implied morbidity. She has a shockingly good imagination for an engineer ;-) I on the other hand see them as places of odd artifacts, accidentally preserved wilderness, and yes a prompt from the inexplicable end that harkens back to the inexplicable beginning;-)

 

Many Thanks!

 

Juris

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  • 2 weeks later...
David W. Parsley

doc, I keep thinking that something profound will drop from mind and I will put it here. Not so much. The poem and its experience is sufficient unto itself. I will trouble myself to say during one stretch, the piece imparts a feeling similar to that experienced when reading WCW's "The Red Wheelbarrow" or Ezra Pound's "At a Station of the Metro." Just part of the haunting in this one. I like it a lot.

 

- Dave

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