Sunday, April 3, 2016

Melinda Smith #3 Song from the Seventh Circle

Inspiration for poem #3: stunted eucalypt saplings on a hillside near Kaleen, ACT.
They look (I thought) like an Australian version of the trees in the Forest of Suicides
in the 7th Circle of Hell, as described in Dante's Inferno

#3 Song from the Seventh Circle
(after Dante, Inferno, Canto XIII)

Snap me;
I will speak from the wound.
Let my story leak out,
honey-red,
become sap
crusting my cursed bark.

(c) Melinda Smith 2016

4 comments:

  1. 'cursed bark' love that! Makes me shiver.

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  2. Beautiful. That where we snap we sing from: such a wonderful definition of poetry (in action, and with your life given for it). Love this. Simple as the universe.

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  3. Thank you ! Have been offline all day, so lovely to see comments from Anne Sarah and Efi when I logged back on. The more I read that bit of the Inferno the more I am struck by the psychological layers in Dante's imagined landscape. How horrifying that it is only injury that frees the cursed trees to speak (in Dante's version it is actual blood that flows out, along with the released voice of the tortured soul). Horrifying but such a resonant idea...

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