Saturday, September 3, 2016

Efi Hatzimanolis #196 excitement lost and regained (after Susan Hawthorne)

once a poet,
the nine year old whose overdue
light from an extinct star
you’re only reading now,
having travelled almost as far, and
ungrammatically, I was told.
I knew everything about stopping,
a sentence, when and where,
a thought, a fire raging on the face
of a mountain. I wrote,
Hungry, licking flames. 

She smote, incomplete sentence.

9 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for your comments everyone!

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  2. Hi Efi. I do not know how to read this. Does it make sense or is something else going on? Perhaps there is too much fog in my head this morning...

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  3. Hi Myron, Briefly, when I was 9, I wrote a self consciously poetic line in a short story which my teacher corrected as ungrammatical. The temerity! (I did know what I was doing.) It's the line being read now in this poem, after a lifetime's travel in becoming a writer, that is, "Hungry, licking flames." And it's an unfinished *sentence*, in both senses of the word. I've tried to construct the poem (and position the line) as suggestively and ambiguously as the metaphors allow, which may be why it reads as dense. I hope that's clarified where it's coming from, at least:) Efi

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