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[eclipse]

Summer arrives in its temporary home, in a house in Iceland a child is waiting to be born, dolls house sits in the attic below the drumming rain on the skylight. A mother dreams about an angel on her stomach with its wings aflame as it holds a newly born baby, within that dream the same figure sits below a tree bearing the fruit of an unborn child.

Leaves are guests of the tree as mother holds her infant below.

[JoelJosol]

I tried to decipher the recursive thoughts and images. I am not familiar with Iceland if it is regular to rain in summer. The key symbols is a mother, the infant, and a tree. I was not able to follow "the same figure" if it referred back to the mother or the infant or an angel.  I was unable to decipher "fruit of an unborn child". 
The final line lets me in to see a scene - a tree and a mother with a baby. 

But the musicality is there, the alliteration, which made it enjoyable to read despite my initial discomfort in forming the image.

[A. Baez]

A prose poem? The sense of mythical import dead-ends at my lack of understanding.

[dcmarti1]

Leaves are guests of the tree

That's some mighty powerful personification!

[tonyv]

On 5/16/2020 at 7:23 PM, A. Baez said:

A prose poem?

That's exactly how I would characterize it. It's image-rich, as we've come to expect from Barry.

My favorite excerpts:

On 5/13/2020 at 10:57 AM, eclipse said:

Summer arrives in its temporary home,

 

On 5/13/2020 at 10:57 AM, eclipse said:

dolls house sits in the attic below the drumming rain on the skylight,

and

On 5/13/2020 at 10:57 AM, eclipse said:

Leaves are guests of the tree ...

 

I've been wanting to write a prose poem. Till now, I've had James Wright's translation of Georg Trakl's "A Winter Night"¹ as inspiration, and now I have "Home," too.

Tony

 

1. When you open the Trakl topic, scroll down to read the prose poem. It has driven me crazy for thirty minutes already trying to figure out how to make an anchor link to the exact place on that page, and I'm moving on. I write poetry, not computer code. 😬

[A. Baez]

Tony, I think the genre of prose poetry is something that I have been away from so long (and have never experienced much) that it's requiring quite a mental gear shift from me to be optimally receptive to it on its own terms. Also, I don't think I was ever 100% sure to begin with how I felt about this genre and what, if anything, really distinguishes it from creative prose.

[tonyv]

Just now, A. Baez said:

Tony, I think the genre of prose poetry is something that I have been away from so long (and have never experienced much) that it's requiring quite a mental gear shift from me to be optimally receptive to it on its own terms. Also, I don't think I was ever 100% sure to begin with how I felt about this genre and what, if anything, really distinguishes it from creative prose.

Well, in my book of James Wright's letters it's something he mentions to one of his contemporaries. He says he prefers to call it a "prose piece."

[A. Baez]

Yes, I think the term "prose poem" tends to raise false expectations, which is not fair to such pieces.

[Tinker]

Certainly this is poetic prose.  Imagery being the strongest element.   I think the first unit of this piece is too run on and long to be considered a unit of prose poetry.   If compared with the classic prose poem Perhaps to World Ends Here by Joy Harjo, I think it shows it needs more work to actually be called a prose poem.   

~~Judi