In loving memory of my father,
John Graham (8/22/48-7/12/19)
midnight rains feed
waters of the underworld
that rage between us
diminishing your secret light
verity a river that
hemorrhages its banks
flood plain of pain
invisible in the lapis night
reed songs silenced
clay of creation formed
sediment of a transitory life
Linked to dVerse Poet’s Pub.
Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.
All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible
Chromapoetica
Nice description of the clay as a “sediment of a transitory life”.
Wonderful lines: “verity a river that / hemorrhages its banks”
Welcome to the pub, Anna, and thank you for sharing a personal poem, in memory of your father. I love the emotion and the mythological inspiration. Your image of the River Styx, raging and haemorrhaging its banks. I also love the internal rhyme of ‘flood plain of pain’, something with which I’m sadly familiar.
Hi Anna, great to read you again – I lost a mythic father in 2018, we shared such a common sidhe. You choose your words carefully here, so the poem reads like a conversation between priests, one living, one gone. Yet what passes in the underworld between speaker and father is beyond both and floods away all bonds. A part of each of us becomes that oblivion. Our making that dust. Well done.
This amazes me. Your use of the extended mythological metaphor is so well handled and concise. And the lack of punctuation allows a productive ambiguity, especially in the last stanza, which for me, moves beyond the river and bank imagery and humans as clay to the stylus and tablet of early forms of writing.
Condolences, Anna. A wonderful tribute to your father.
My condolences, Anna. The poem is beautifully well written. Bless you my friend.