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On the last poem I might ever write in the next fifteen minutes

by Jordan789 

Posted: 18 June 2007
Word Count: 140


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Some say the world's a cave of wearies,
lost today, and we're left to watch the shadows play
on cave walls.
And what of those drawings of buffalo,
and the men who once carved their stories
in chalk, and how their language probably never
included the word "honorable," or "heroic,"
or "tidy."

I "tidy" the sink, and I want to draw buffaloes
with chalk.
I scrub lemon scent freshness into everything,
but maybe the world's smell, six-thousand years ago
felt somehow more "heroic."
More "honorable."
because instead of drawing buffaloes,
i could draw myself in stick-figure black, pressing sponge to porcelain,
and a faucet running in the background. Niagara, or that
really tall one called heaven's leap, or angel falls, that
thin one
that plummets for miles
before
splashing into itself.

Or I could pretend
and just draw a buffalo.






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James Graham at 21:00 on 18 June 2007  Report this post
I like the subject of this poem - not the first time you've made a good poem out of ordinary stuff. The speaker does a few kitchen chores and lets his imagination wander - which is more than enough to make a poem. I also like the way the poem has kept a lot of the immediacy of that short spell in the kitchen. The basic technique for that is keeping it in the present tense, of course, but there's also the sense we get of a kind of free association of ideas - cave walls to buffalo drawings, running faucet to great waterfalls. You manage to communicate to the reader that sense of (almost) being present in your kitchen, hearing you say, 'This may seem crazy, but I feel like drawing a buffalo on the wall'. If the reader has enough imagination, he/she will say, 'Sure. Why not?'

It's got immediacy and spontaneity, but the thoughts that surface are better than just casual. They add up to a gentle, not over-serious, exploration of the differences between then and now, of what several millennia have done to us. I think in the last lines the poem recognises that it's no good pretending. If we draw a buffalo, all we do is make a picture of a buffalo. If you happen to be a zoological illustrator, and it's accurate enough, somebody will pay you for it. But we can never again draw a buffalo the way those ancient folks did. It was probably as necessary to them to make the image as it was to kill the animal.

The lines about words in our language and theirs are interesting too. There's no way we can ever know whether they had words for certain concepts. 'Heroic', perhaps, to describe one of their community who had done something others wouldn't dare to do. I could imagine they knew 'heroic', but 'tidy' strikes me as an inspiration on your part - it just seems that 'tidy' would be the very last concept that cave people would formulate. The idea of tidyness seems the epitome of the differences between ancient and modern.

The poem touches on ideas around the significance of what we do. It seems to say our chores and other routine things we do are rituals of a sort, but rather empty ones compared with the 'chores' that neolithic people did. People who comment on poems maybe over-use the word 'thought-provoking', but in this case it's appropriate. Ancient peoples, hunters, gatherers, cave-painters, are a preoccupation of mine anyway - but your poem has reactivated the prehistoric part of my brain.

James.


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