Poetry — Where did the Poetry go?
The pile of papers, folders and envelopes was wrapped in a paper bag so old it looked like wrinkled brown leather. The papers themselves were yellowed with age, almost the color of the few manilla folders on the bottom of the stack. Altogether about an inch and a half thick, there were four parts to the stack: A quarter inch of loose papers, three-eights inch of old envelopes, a half inch of neatly stacked papers and a quarter inch of manilla folders. If there was an answer, it would be in this stack.
The question is, where did the poetry go for almost forty years? To find out, I searched for the pile of papers I had hidden away somewhere, many years before. This then, was the collection of things I had written back then. For some reason, I had set them aside and, busy with other things, had never gone back and picked up the threads of rhythm and rhyme. I had not bothered to reflect the wonder of life in words until ... But Then....
Leafing through the stack, I read. The loose papers on top were mostly trash. That is, they were sheets of paper with a fragment typed onto them, until a typing error occurred, then the typing stopped. I threw out about twenty pages of it. Or, they were copies with a pencilled note — sent to such-and-such a magazine with a month/day but no year. The envelopes were self-addressed return envelopes containing pre-printed rejection notes. The neat stack of papers appeared to be set up like a short book in two parts. It was mostly poetry with a couple of stories and letters. Some of it was good, some of it was mediocre, some of it was just fragments. The folders contained copies of things which had been sent to various magazines.
The third page from the end of the neat stack held the one poem that I had felt, at the time, to be the end of writing.
The sifted sand,
Filtering down through the
Wooden bones and calcium plaster
Of overhead rafters,
Falls —
Streaming threads of hot, dry grit
........................Which cloud into dust;
Warmingly stacking, dust on dust;
Filling, covering, burying all
........................In spice-dry earth;
Closing, darkening 'till, finally,
The packed up-tightness
And scorched-earth scent
Are smothered beneath the sunbaked warmth
........................Of oncoming death.
Reading it, I can still smell the dust, and feel the smothering effect of it. But, of course, that wasn't the end. It just felt like it at the time. Maybe because I graduated from high school about then. But There were other poems, written later than that in the stack. So, I don't think it was just a matter of stopping.
One of my favorites, reprinted below, has the title, "Retribution." It was written around the same time, sometime in the late 1960's.
I stalked the shimmering sunlight sea,
Lance in hand.
Searching the swirling flashes of sand
I plotted, planned.
Patiently,
Waiting to strike through the ribboning
................bands of streaming thought.
I ran, and
Threading the swelling sound of light,
struck hard;
Drove deep the stinging barb of spite
................in ringing laughter.
I, then,
Stepping aside to view the pain,
Was tripped —
Stripped to fright,
Whip-lashed by the glance
Of a glistening flash —
My lance,
Hurled back from the depths
Of a splash of wetness
And agony,
Welled in a tear of despair.
Only then, I saw: My pain was her.
Sticks and stones may break ... but words ...
................[Too late, the knowledge:
Love harms not the loved, for thus it slays itself.
................Unread, the book explaining:
31:18 Cause, the effect affects the.]*
*The last two (four?) lines [in brackets] are only included in the longer version of the poem. I had to add the many dots to force the HTML to let the words indent.
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