Open Poetry #17 |
POETS AND PLACES, Part I |
Glenn Logan Member
since 2001-10-10
Posts 111Virginia |
Do ghosts of ourselves still walk the maple streets of Carlinville, knowing that we ourselves will never go there again? Is Carlinville still there? Should we care? If it's lost - no big loss, you might suppose. But what else has been lost in the ocean of forgetfulness, in the sea of minds beating the sands of time? Atlantis and its sisters have sunk a million times in a million human minds, have been among the many places washed away in the rinse cycles of our minds, covered by silver suds of surging seas that wash away the past each day. What hope, then, for Carlinville? Is its apparent demise in my mind due only to the fact that it has never found its poet? Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and the ancient Villon: Yes, where have they all gone: poets, poems and places? In forgetting them, do we bury our souls? But have we forgotten? With Baudelaire buried, do we feel any better, feel any less mal in our songs? Do flowers appear any more innocent, now that he's gone? Has Shelley - both drowned at sea and burnt on land - joined Ozymandias beneath the burning sands of time? Can I not still stroll the streets of old Florence with Niccolò Machiavelli - Florence's brightest and best - and share a laugh with Bellini or Cellini, while giving Laura and Petrarch a wink? Isn't old London still there, even with Dickens dead? Is Tiny Tim still hungry? Will he be fed? Of course, we know he's alive and starving - and always will be, waiting for his Christmas dinner. And certainly Hamlet, his enemies, and the family ghosts still stroll the Danish coast, and also always will be alive and dying somewhere in Britain. John Milton now sings tenor with the Holy Choir Invisible, while the Devil plays pan pipes, and Thomas Gray, viewing all this musical commotion from far away, again recites his churchyard elegy, while Hemingway's Spanish bells toll on. (POEM CONTINUES: SEE PART II) |
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© Copyright 2001 Glenn Logan - All Rights Reserved | |||
Sunshine
Administrator
Member Empyrean
since 1999-06-25
Posts 63354Listening to every heart |
Well, this is certainly carrying me on...to Part II! |
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Sudhir Iyer Member Ascendant
since 2000-04-26
Posts 6943Mumbai, India : now in Belgium |
and I am rushing on too.... regards, sudhir |
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