Tuesday, July 6, 2010

"Remnants"

[Please enjoy this week's poem by B.N., a beautiful example of terza rima!]

Remnants

Lately you embrace the regularity
In what you know, the obvious transitions
Between the seasons, long stretches of ordinary

Days filled by simple tasks, a reason
To go out and buy a useless shade of solitary
Cloth, now abandoned in a drawer alongside legions

Of stashed rubber bands, old stamps.  An imaginary
Tapestry you could never bring yourself to start
Except for a few stitches as a border, a momentary

Fidelity to a bright crimson, a heart
Shaped emblem started slowly to emerge.
Now Prussian red accumulates in the dark.

Even the letter you tried to write almost verge
On the brink of some archaic sadness.
History moved at break-neck speed to merge

Together all the details. Dead of winter, an early darkness
Tucked even the seraphs into bed, those famous piles of stacked
Eye glasses, hair and shoes and the immense

Expanse of what you have tried to explain in a letter
Give them a vision, a comb, and a map to follow
The route home tracing along the cracked

Glass frame of the one, the only photo
You managed to save, it sits like a knife
Or bread, on a table, intimate, essential.


B.N.
© to the author 1983-2010

4 comments:

  1. It has a quiet reflective rhythm,
    a memorial to those slowing down before us.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Dianne: Glad you enjoyed BN's poem!

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  3. There is a keen familiarity about the emotions and images. I feel the poem is about me - which is always a good thing for a poem.

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  4. Hi Alan: Yes, that is a mark of a good poem--glad you liked it!

    ReplyDelete

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