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Dancing Flowers, Eggplant's Dirge In May, my heart races as if in love! When I rush to pick up my first delivery at the Farmer's Market, I go as a child to her mother, where perfumed gifts wait. All is for my delight... pink cotton candy, blue balloons and silver spinning pinwheels. Streets are filled with dancing flowers, hot garlic pasta songs surround my produce stand. I smile my name, hugging a box of earth-sweet pleasures to my breast and dance away with it! Slowly, I open it, devouring with my eyes, first, green and red lettuce, show-off carrots, jazzy red radishes, layers of rosemary, thyme, sweet basil, bay leaves and pungent chives. I caress them with my fingers, try to slip away to be alone with my box, but a girl blooms yellow wildflowers and crowns me with them like laurels, layering them in my arms as roses blessing a soloist. Late summer offers only consoling ears of corn, merry blackberries who promise me more, always more cobblers. Now, green beans and purple eggplants sing a longing dirge, while I mourn with wreaths of dried flowers wearing black. Days grow dark and slowly chill the earth. While I open pale boxes in silent ceremony, solemn gourds, winter squash and pumpkins whisper elegies over fall's garden graves. |
This Poem was Critiqued By: Troy D Skroch On Date: 2005-03-22 00:10:38
Critiquer Rating During Critique: 1.00000
Joanne,
It's been awhile since we last talked and I've started to miss you. LOL I can't help it. So I decided to go back in time and comment on a few of your poems. It's interesting to look at your writing past and present and feel for the changes good or bad. Most times the person doesn't change, but the cosmetics of their writing does. Meaning they learn how to state something in different ways. This can be more "poetic" or just distracting. It really depends. When a person first starts writing some the best pages or poems they will ever write are right in front of their eyes. Their true intent. Their most honest expression. And sometimes you only see glimpses of what's to come.
Now, perhaps you ask yourself why I care? Why did I travel back to October of 2000 to read your poem? Why would anyone take the time to look for clues into another’s writing unless they're doing a thesis on somebody who is famous by publication? The answer is simple. I've worked 29 of the last 30 days and I'm bored to tears with solving and satisfying the selfish human questions that are thrown at me everyday. I want to actually learn something. Not that I'm prying into your personal life. I want to learn more about heart felt expression. It's important to me as I consider it an eternal language. I see it as the bridge to forever in this moment not forgetting. I crystallize my self in this and it protects me from the mundane and bizarre dogma I wade through daily. It recharges me. It's my armor. And by the way, if one has any ability at all to feel another's writing they don't have to run to next great "writing" seminar, they just need to be sensitive to their self and the person or people that are right in front of them. It's analogous. Let your very being sing out and project you both through your silence and words. Wrap yourself in this and never be sad or afraid as this gift you give to yourself will keep you through all pain and carry you through and beyond existence. If some of the people I deal with would just stop and listen to the line in this poem "I smile my name", how my life would improve.
I also think that you've drawn me into your poetry, something, perhaps the stars, lined us up for a time. It's no coincidence, but that's no matter. I intend to make the best of our time. Let's move on.
"I smile my name", did you understand the implications of that when you wrote it or did it just appear? Was it as if you reached for it and it was waiting to be written? It has the feel and power of the language and expression that you referred to in the last critique you wrote for me. So simple sounding but complex and powerful. Beautiful.
And hugging that line close the little bug scuttles back under the refrigerator no longer praying for salvation, but living it. LOL
I do love the farmers market.
Goodnight Silly Bean,
Troy
p.s. If you need me I’ll be wandering around in the year 2000, just leave a message. LOL