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Jenny Vandepoel Poem
(A BIT OF BACKGROUND: The poem's persona is viewing a well-loved manga painting of a stately but abandoned old home, featuring an ethereal young girl who looks sad, and a number of half-hidden specters. This sonnet seeks to express the persona's longing for the painting to become a living, moving scene that can be influenced.)
Milady May, if I could make you real
I'd cast a dreamer's spell on this tableau
Of light and magic, make the people know
The range of things a girl like you would feel.
We'd make the people wonder why the tears
Silent-shed beneath the blossom tree.
We'd have them scanning every inch to see
What trials have made you older than your years.
They'd raptly seek for evidence and crave
Some promise of what is and isn't true,
Some hope of future happiness for you,
Some hint why you're at once both sad and brave.
These ghosts and beasts, the show they'll try to steal.
We'll hint at clues, for now, we must conceal.
Copyright © Jenny Vandepoel | Year Posted 2017
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Details |
Jenny Vandepoel Poem
The cold would just as soon you didn't make it home
Till spring, when frozen bodies thaw,
Gaunt coyotes bless their stars and drag you off.
The only thing that's stirring in the crystal strath
Is deep beneath
Waiting for:
not yet,
not yet,
not yet...
Life is wily.
Winter can go to hell, says life, let's take a nap.
Next year's wildflowers: numb bullets.
Sleek fat rodents curl in thatch-lined burrows
Peaceful piles of neighbors
Sleep like their young, too deep for dreaming.
Well, lesser beings
May stoop to hibernation.
Noble homo sapiens shun the easy path
Push on with shelter, firewood, the hunt
Push on till half demented, two-thirds blind.
The after-solstice strengthening cold,
Not without some irony
Would just as soon be entertained.
The ageless cold abides
Content to watch you struggle
Till, your lips too blue to shape a single curse
You throw your hat down, seek your simple hearth,
Try again tomorrow.
Never mind the swiftness of the weather
Abrupt and deafening storms that shred your lungs with ice...
Never mind, but then...
When winter's expectant quiet looms a bit too long
It settles in your bones...
Never mind the quiet.
Bring to mind instead, the gentle promise of spring, when grasses –
No. Not yet.
A cold, unearthly howling
splits the silence
keen as shards...
Seems to split your very skull and makes you
Crave the silence back with all you are.
Nothing with a throat, no lung
Could make that sound.
...weather-sculpted ice in deep ravines
...the wind, just so
Blows anthems from beyond to stump your earthly ear
But you know nothing.
It's a sound that overwhelms, you've guessed as much.
And if it leaves you flat too long
The cold would just as soon supply your grave
As wait eleven winters more
And watch another elder making
Breakfast for a bear.
Copyright © Jenny Vandepoel | Year Posted 2017
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