I don't want to bore you. I hate wasting people's time. Time is invaluable and we don't have unlimited resources. Allow me to pause for a moment and thing of something meaningful... okay, all else has failed and I've made up my mind. I'm showing you a piece of writing that I've been debating whether or not to share with anyone. Now the debate is closed and I'm hitting publish.
As a note before this piece, I'd like to say that I've been reading a lot lately and thinking (in syncronicity with my older sister) that I want to meet a boy and have a summer romance. And this is incredibly naive and somewhat shallow of me but that's what we both want. Experience in the field. So this is about that, sort of.
I want a lot of things
I want to fall in love.
I want to lie in the grass with my eyes closed as the sun kisses my fingers and I kiss you.
I want to wake up smiling and not open my eyes so that I can hold on to the dream of you that I can already feel myself forgetting.
I want to hold your hand and have you hold me back like a lifesaver in the ocean, your one chance for survival.
I want to taste your breath and feel your heart beating, as fast as mine, under my hand.
I want to sit cross legged on the sidewalk facing you, as people navigate around us, and stare into your eyes like they contain the secrets of the world, or, at the very least, a glimpse at you, behind the physical exterior.
I want to know you, not too much so that you can still surprise me but enough that I can feel like I'll never know enough.
I want to trace the lines on your feet as you lie on the couch watching actors on a screen play characters with emotions of love that don't feel remotely similar to ours.
I want to memorize your laugh and your smile and then realize that's impossible.
I want you to think I am beautiful, not just that I look it.
I want us to sit on the beach and watch the trains go by and not say a word because silence isn't always scary.
In short, I want a lot.
Probably more than I deserve.
I've always been selfish and greedy
but maybe if I had these things,
I wouldn't need to be anymore. Maybe if I had you,
I wouldn't want anything.
Poetry is subjective. I know this and I think Vita was trying to prove this point with her poem, or maybe she wasn't. I didn't find those last three lines to be the saddest I've ever read. I don't know what I thought of the poem exactly.
I have to go. Bedtime. Tense house. Need sleep. Catch you on the flip flop.
1 comment:
Yeah, poetry is definitely subjective. It took me a long while to understand that poem; I had to analyze it with for an English class & initially I was underwhelmed, but when I went back through and really thought about what he was trying to say & all that good stuff, those last 3 lines struck me as incredibly sad yet incredibly perfect. I had a revelation, if you will. =)
I took it to mean that she isn't literally stroking a boy's hair but rather caressing the name on the wall as she would have actually touched his hair in real life. In the second to last line, the poet sets you up to believe that the woman is trying to erase a name, i.e. erase the memorial of his death from the wall, i.e. erase the fact that he has died. Then in the last line, the poet himself experiences a shift in his thinking and chooses to believe that, no, she's not trying to do the impossible and kill his death, but instead that she is experiencing that "touch" for perhaps the last time. From the context - they're at the war memorial, she's obviously personally invested in the wall - I inferred that she is a mother or sister or wife or girlfriend, but I really took to heart the idea that she might be a mother. Can you remember a time, especially as a little kid, when you were really upset and your mom just held you in her arms and stroked your hair until you calmed down? It's really that image that makes the end of the poem so sad, I think; this motherly figure (whether she is a mother or not) comforting this boy for the last time, perhaps comforting herself, as well. I can very clearly picture her standing there, I can picture the expression on her face - a sort of sad, wistful, half-smile - and I can imagine what she is thinking.
That combined with the blurring line between the wall & its visitors, the dead & the living, imagination & reality really just struck me.
People rarely feel the exact same way when it comes to poetry... I don't hold it against you if you don't like that poem, haha. :)
Also, I like your poem, & I agree. :)
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