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Sometimes
Posted: 10 February 2008
Word Count: 109
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Sometimes
Sometimes
I clutch
At fragile twigs
Grasp hard
Struggle
With a
Futile
Pretence
Watching
The flickering
Kaleidoscope
Of lies
And peat.
Sometimes
I confuse
The bright reds
In the sunlight
With
The ribbons
I saw
When I
First
Opened
My eyes.
Sometimes
The warmth
Creates a
Transient amnesia
That lulls me
Into
An irrational
Joy.
Sometimes
I find myself
Stepping
Across
Algae-coated
Stones
In water.
Sometimes
The forgiveness
I believe in
Colludes
In the silent
Re-writing
Of histories.
Sometimes
That
Makes
Me
A
Collaborator.
And sometimes
I cannot
Sleep.
---Jib, 2:26pm, 10 Feb. 08
At home, wearing a chunky jumper even though the sunlight was overheating my body.
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Comments by other Members
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 James Graham at 19:04 on 13 February 2008
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Hi Jibunnessa - I’m sure you know how sometimes when you read a poem for the first time, certain lines come to life immediately, jump off the page as it were. The lines that did that for me were
Sometimes
The warmth
Creates a
Transient amnesia
That lulls me
Into
An irrational
Joy. |
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This gave me an instant shock of recognition. I felt you had expressed something that happens to me, and that I had never managed to express - certainly not so convincingly. It’s no good my trying to paraphrase your words - i.e. give my own version - so as to explain why these lines speak to me. I’ll say only that a ‘transient amnesia’ that ‘lulls me into an irrational joy’ perfectly describes something that takes place in my head from time to time. I almost said ‘daily’, but perhaps not quite. This amnesia-joy can be called up by ‘warmth’ in a literal sense, but also by warmth of mood, or good news. I think perhaps your ‘warmth’ could be taken non-literally as well as literally.
But I understand the rest of the poem too. The ‘algae-coated stones’ stanza is a vivid glimpse of something that could be understood literally - meaning there is an actual place nearby with stepping stones; sometimes I walk there - but clearly has references to other experience and other feelings. I like the way you’ve kept these lines ‘pure’, i.e. simply described crossing water by treacherous stepping stones, but without imposing any interpretation on it. It works very well.
I can recognise what you say in the last sections. It’s maybe not ‘forgiveness’ in my case, but a need to understand why people do what they do, that leads to the ‘rewriting of histories’. The reasons why ‘I cannot /sleep’ are well established in the poem, and for that reason the closing lines are convincing.
The one part that puzzles me is the firat stanza. The images don’t seem to belong to one another - clutching at twigs while watching a flickering kaleidoscope? And ‘lies and peat’ is mystifying. Peat from the moors, used for fuel? Maybe if you explain I’ll see it, but these lines are a bit opaque to me in a poem that otherwise makes a big impact.
I like the way you add a footnote telling us where you were and what you were doing at the time of writing. You used to add something like that to poems quite often, as I recall. There are the brief indications poets sometimes give of place and/or date ('London, 1995') but I don't know of anybody who tells the reader more than that, except a medieval Scottish poet called William Dunbar, who for example at the end of one of his most sombre poems writes, 'Quoth Dunbar, when he was sick'. Putting the writing of the poem into a setting like that is an idea that intrigues me. A lot could be made of it.
James.
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Jibunnessa 
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