Tuesday, January 24, 2006

There is hope yet

The silence before the beginning of words,
Where you are afraid everything
Has a name but you don’t know it.
The knock at the door before
Knowing what that is, still startles,
Breaks the endless dream of
Individual being, or starts it,

Aware you are in tune with things
And Sextus, Montaigne, Hume
Rattle the bars of their hopeless doubt
For disbelief of the door that is all around them.

A room of doors that serve as walls
Where Jeddai trees battle motionlessly
With their shade sabers cutting lifeless swaths.
We are motionless as ideas
Separated from all life,
Empty as the shadow of a person.

If we realized, we would open the door
to discover a dusty brow and a glistening road.

5 comments:

Sue hardy-Dawson said...

'We are motionless as ideas'I like the standing on the outside feeling, it gives you a conspiritorial intimacy with the poet watching life

Sue hardy-Dawson said...

About the other thing, I think poetry is when someone catches a glimpse of something, familiar and odinary in a allencompassing and special way, a way that they feel no one may have noticed before. So distracted and intense is the feeling that it must be caught on paper to be revisited when the longing for it becomes to much.

Russell Ragsdale said...

Hi Sue, thanks for all the great comments and things! There is a part of me that has always felt on the outside, watching.

About poetry, I posted the poem Ars Poetica to explain what I feel poetry does and why. I am about to post another poem about where poetry come from and how. We really do have a deep longing for the things we see in our poetic mode that eventually overwhelms us with longing for them.

Sue hardy-Dawson said...

the longing is like daylight though it fill you with joy when you visit an old friend of a poem that took you somewhere special. Poems I read in my youth can transport me back to the moment of their first revelation, it's a wonderful feeling, I searched for years for a poem I'd read at school and couldn't remember the title of

Russell Ragsdale said...

Ah, Sue, that golden moment when the longing fells answered.