Here is all that I have built
sandcastles at dawn a
shattering symphony of glass
ornate melodies crashing
jagged chords, unsung losses
haunted chorus in a strange land
Take me inland
to flowered meadows
build me a cottage
on a sun-soaked hill
Did I remember you, years ago?
a lilting whisper on the wind
before the cycle of tides
carried me to sea foam
swirling in memory
immaterial and lost
Take me inland
to flowered meadows
build me a cottage
on a sun-soaked hill
dissonant shoreline stretches
to a horizon out of reach
sunlight kisses the beach
eroding my last attachments
released to an undertow
I forget every name
Take me inland
to flowered meadows
build me a cottage
on a sun-soaked hill
burn my forsaken heart
in your stone hearth
let my ashes rest at home
I was so pleased to find you linking up again,… it’s been a while, your poem is such a wonderful romantic journey ending in the ending… made me think of that line “better to burn than fade away”
I really like the repetition here, it gives this a song-like feel. I like the way the mood of that repeated chorus changes through the poem – at the start I thought it was cosy, by the end I wondered if this was a grave? The contrast with the “sea” sections is wonderful.
Hi Anna, lovely to read you again. I read this like a haunting love song, with the refrain lines of Take me inland. The last 3 lines burns with passionate finality.
Hi Anna, good to read you again — this is quite a departure from the work I remember — sweet but not maudlin, soft but not anaethetized. Sounds like heart music to me.
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Denise Levertov
When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.
Postmodernism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and/or cultural mindset that questions institutionalism, hierarchy, power, and simple, knowable truth. Alternatively it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, fractured metaphysics, multiplicity, deconstruction, and diversity. In poetry it offers semiotic liberty.
Robert Anton Wilson
Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).
Witold Gombrowicz
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.
Gustav Flaubert
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Dušan “Charles” Simić
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Monique Wittig
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.
W.S. Merwin
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
Thomas Aquinas
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Chromapoetica 
I was so pleased to find you linking up again,… it’s been a while, your poem is such a wonderful romantic journey ending in the ending… made me think of that line “better to burn than fade away”
I really like the repetition here, it gives this a song-like feel. I like the way the mood of that repeated chorus changes through the poem – at the start I thought it was cosy, by the end I wondered if this was a grave? The contrast with the “sea” sections is wonderful.
Really like the way your lovely poem is constructed, coming around again to central lines…lovely ‘dialogue’ addressed to one loved…..so nice…
A soulful song in this poem. A masterful job! Bravo!
This is so beautiful, it feels like a dream.
Hi Anna, lovely to read you again. I read this like a haunting love song, with the refrain lines of Take me inland. The last 3 lines burns with passionate finality.
So beautiful and full of aching regret!
Hi Anna, good to read you again — this is quite a departure from the work I remember — sweet but not maudlin, soft but not anaethetized. Sounds like heart music to me.
So full of longing. The repetition is like a song chorus, and the poem itself is romantic and lovely.
I feel like this could be a song. Lovely!
A beautiful poem. Well done.
Such beautiful lines of repetition, like a song or chant.
The longing is so palpable and that last stanza is heartbreaking.