National Poetry Month

[brigdh]

Parts of Speech - Ingrid de Kok

Some stories don't want to be told.
They walk away, carrying their suitcases
held together with grey string.
Look at their disappearing curved spines.
Hunch-backs. Harmed ones. Hold-alls.

Some stories refuse to be danced or mimed,
drop their scuffed canes
and clattering tap-shoes,
erase their traces in nursery rhymes
or ancient games like blind man's buff.

And at this stained place words
are scraped from resinous tongues,
wrung like washing, hung on the lines
of courtroom and confessional,
transposed into the dialect of record.

Why still believe stories can rise
with wings, on currents, as silver flares,
levitate unweighted by stones,
begin in pain and move towards grace,
aerating history with recovered breath?

Why still imagine whole words, whole worlds:
the flame splutter of consonants,
deep sea-anemone vowels,
birth-cable syntax, rhymes that start in the heart,
and verbs, verbs that move mountains?

Comments

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Some events tell their stories like people speaking
In languages long forgotten.
Like foreigners at parties, we struggle to listen,
Not to have heard what is said, but because someone is telling us something,
And we understand just a little.
STC 4/27/2011

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, I really like that.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That makes me happy.