Friday, January 22, 2010

"A Lily Knows Cemetaries Mourn"

Through blogging, we meet such a variety of people with so many talents and interests. Since this blog is a hash of topics, interests, hobbies, and commentary, it even attempts to try something bordering on poetry. There are at least two blogger friends who write poetry frequently - "Inky's Poems", and "A Blade of Grass". They have different styles, but both are very interesting, and thought provoking.

Inky's warm and heartfelt closeness to those in her life, unleashes words that proclaim raw caring, so real, and ultimately so informative of her so wonderful human depth of feeling.

Jon's waxinggrasshopper.blogspot.com, requires new interpretative attempts from me to understand his type of poetry. Just over a week ago, he invited his readers to type in the word verification code at the end of their comments, so that he could put these "words" into an anagram generator, and see if there was some "hidden" meaning, or something that actually, poetically made sense. After over a dozen entries, he produced four results, one of which is the title of this post, and in his follow up blog post, showed the results, to which readers could comment, or build on a line that sparked a meaning to them.

My family used to play our own game of poetry at one time, by first writing 3 lines of whatever thought you wanted, then fold the first two lines, and so that the person you passed the sheet to, only saw the last single line, and could continue thier next two lines, based on the one they saw. After a few rounds of doing this, each "poem" was read, and it mostly sounded non-sensically hilarious, but now and then, there were nuggets of some small life truth. Jon's experiment reminded me of that.

So below is one of my constructions of this foundation thought from Jon's experiment. It may not make sense, but if you feel like building on the title please share here, and maybe I can learn something more about this form of expression.

"A Lily Knows Cemeteries Mourn"

the living, and still blossoming being aware of the void left in the now dead silence of loved ones homes, and lives.

they know all too well about feeling lifeless for long times, yet they are reborn. Lilies have the likeness of those who have lived before them, and carry on the perennial tradition of rebirth, proudly displaying and acting out the life of their predecessors so that past lives lives on in them.

Just as the lilies near cemeteries are witness to mourning, the lilies, those neighbours to temporary household cemeteries, also know the loss. Like all lilies, they see loss and rebirth, and can know how neighboring cemeteries mourn. As memories of some humble quiet lilies provide subtle glimmers of brightness in dark times, the community lilies are also there to add light in those dark periods without sun.

Lilies come, go, and come again, sticking to their roots of steadfast continuance of family traits, so that the graceful qualities of past generations live on, and are never fully gone.

4 comments:

Jon said...

I was looking at the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters
when I remarked the lily, the lily

medallion in the grasp of Orion,
as I lay next to the flower bed,

beside the garden pond.
My mind wanders, remembers,

wants to speak to me secret
places to go to remember

the lily, the summer, the lost blossom.

Jon said...

Hi Charlie,

Thanks for the links and the write up on my site... I'm glad that you're enjoying this foray back into poetry... and the game you played with your family... so cool... i'm going to have to try this out with the other writers in the community here... that is, if you don't mind...

i wonder how I'd get them to not read the 2 and 3 line of the work in progress before they got it... hmmmm...

hope you're well mate... and that things are going good on the rock!

jon

Charlie said...

Hey Jon, thanks for the poem and comment. Fine and smooth flowing words you've presented here. I will learn from masters like yourself.

You're welcome for the mention.
On the poetry game, that would be tricky online I'm thinking. Perhaps, you might have to change it a bit. For example, if you start of with three lines (and tell your readers that), but just show your readers, the last (third) line, and ask them to submit two of their own to you. * (for this post, you could turn of instant message display until you have read the message), and then you could just add the last line of reader's contributions.. and post, for the next reader to contribute... Well, actually, this could really be too complicated, and a lot of work, but if you think of a way to do it, I'll be contributing.
Things are fine on the rock, winter is relatively good. All the best!

Jon said...

Interesting idea Charlie... I'm going to give it a try later the week... i like the idea about moderating the comments first... that way, no one gets to see the sum total until after a while...

sneaky! I love it...