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Conquistador The new crusades have called you a Franciscan or Jesuit by your side. Men that have met the taste of steel and blood coursed through and through to wonder What side of death this day will wrought. Magnificent arab mounts spirited to prance men upon them Indians cannot reckon only men A touch of gait quickly stilled to steady cold starkness confining all to intent The view of temple met with smell day's heat, its cuprous play upon streaming Life Force flowing in stone channels from above The younger cannot catch their breath the sight betrays clinging still to innocense The arms and legs bundled like wood while vampire priests peddle them to market vendors. Havoc follows, a priest cursing Latin, heads hitting the stones marbling with blood, not tidy like troughs flowing to the ground staining it crimson for a while. Nightfall envelops blessing horror with indistinctness Bernal Diaz writes in blood the ink is lacking His capitan braves the darkness leaving him alone Cortez in mystery his priest cannot console did he come from where flesh was rendered (to free the soul) To find where death alone was awe? |
Additional Notes:
Bernal Diaz, chronicled the earliest of Cortez's expeditions. His "Conquest of New Spain" is considered
primary source material by historians. "Vampire" is not metaphor, as exampled by a mural on a sarcophagus
cover in Chichen Itza.
This Poem was Critiqued By: Mark Steven Scheffer On Date: 2008-09-05 12:10:38
Critiquer Rating During Critique: 10.00000
JCH,
The best way to bury our hatchet is to . . . bury it. I come with shovel in hand.
I have an inherent leaning toward a certain architecture in poetry. Of course we all do. Your poems, almost invariably, are of a different built than my leaning. So I have avoided them. You have taught me of the value of having something to say, and you are so right about that. To create poetry that makes a difference, you must express the difference, the thing that separates men from apes. It is not architecture. Being a polymath, I'm sure you could point to creations of the animal or insect world that, architecturally, are as fine as anything man has made. But our makings surpass them. Why? Obviously not because of the architecture, but something else. What the architecture expresses - the human difference. That sublime difference which makes poetry and everything else we do worthwhile. Which is clearly not the architecture alone, as i said.
But the architecture matters. We are talking about "art," after all. So the poems that make a difference have something to say and are as well made as the finest beehive BESIDES.
Anyway, you always have something to say, and since that is where the difference lies, it is better to say something and lack a little in architecture, than have all the splendor of the beehive, but be nothing more than a poem that doesn't have a meaning much greater than a beautiful house.
I still can't tell you I like your architecture. But I've learned that, in judging poems that fall short of the greatness that has both, meaning and architecture - describing about 99% of the poems submitted here, nime included - the ones with meaning are superior, and truer to what we are ultimately trying to accomplish when we strive to write a poem with both.
Thus any honest judgment must have your best poems, like this one, at or near the top here.
MSS