DDCPoetry

  We start with exposition, "We were waiting for a train in the echoing underground. / I was thirteen. He was old, a family friend, a refugee from another century," Without knowing the context of the poem at first, I wondered why there was two of them on the train -- a young girl and a old family friend, until, "The Gestapo hammered at his front door with the order for his arrest" and now we're in a very specific time and a general area in Europe.  The  Gestapo is the secret police of Nazi Germany.  This brings to light some insight on the "refugee from another century" who "walked out the back door with nothing but his passport in his pocket." We return to the train station and the girl and the friend have a slight conversation: Just before our train thundered into the station, making it impossible to hear out of the blue, he said to me, memory is a paradise no one can expel you from. This morning, in another century, I woke up remembering.

  "This well-used little bag is just the right size / to carry a copy of the Psalms. It's plain-woven  / flowers and helicopter share the sky with bombs" The internal rhyme of "Psalms" and "bombs" really foreshadows the juxtaposition of reality and ideals.  The book bag being the holding prayers and from up above bombs. "falling like turnips--he who makes light of other / men will be killed by a turnip." The poem becomes a bit farcical here, but if someone dies because of their ideals, aren't they killed because of them?  If someone sees bombs as turnips, bombs are still bombs no matter the perceptions. "A bachelor. / I wear it across my shoulder--it's easier to be / a bachelor all my life than a widow for a day." To forgo any search of love because eventually you'll be a widow is a grim reality.  But again this is the reality versus the ideal.  It'd be great to fall in love, but reality, the speaker could die at any

Charles E. Burchfield I'm not sure if this is an ekphrastic poem or not.  I also don't know if this poem is a response to the life and style of "Charles Burchfield."  But from what I read on the wiki, and just looking through some of his artwork, there's a sense of surrealness in his paintings, but there's always the ambiance of nature sketched one line at a time. The start of this poem feels expository to set-up the persona.  The lines are vivid with imagery of darkness or wanting to retreat into the dark: "I soared over darkened / fields" and  As the sun rose over the hill I plunged into the dusky woods to avoid the blinding light and become lodged between two young white pines. The speaker is hyper sensitive to the "blinding light" and hides away between pines.  And during this time of hiding, the owl and the pines start to become one as the lines continue the owl becomes more tree like as "my blood to sap / my body to wood." T

At Last by Etta James Listen to this a couple times over and then come back to this poem.  Or read this poem and then listen.  They are in conversation with each other.  But how much in conversation. The opening line of this poem and Etta James song deals with time with the poem starting off with time getting shorter every year, and Etta James singing her lonely days are over.  However, after the opening line the poem goes to a surreal trip down a memory lane "and we broke into sound the slightest lash of the / feather duster and we had bricks up our sleeves".  What type of sound did the speaker and this other break into?  A cry? A laugh? Does it matter?  A unified sound.  What does the bricks represent?  Maybe take a brick as a brick -- something that is thought of weight. you can't imagine and climbed three steps at a time-- though one of the version was we never got there or one of us got there first by banging the dashboard, though I'd say it was getting there and

  When I first read this poem, I looked up the title, Arroyo : 1) A deep gully cut by an intermittent stream, a dry gulch.  2) A brook; a creek. I feel this is a persona poem where we get perspective of an Arroyo, as well as another entity there "living" through the experience. The poem starts out with a curt opening statement, "In this place we define things."  which is then followed by the fragment, "In terms of absence."  In my mind, I think both sentences go together, something like "In this place we define things in terms of absence."  But the period in the middle separates the ideas, and with being so abrupt absence is noted.  I do think the two sentences are different ideas to punctuate absence like, "No new air. No saving grace."  No salvation in place. "Our suspicion is: There are better ways of understanding. [Number them.]" The punctuation slows down each statement and makes me wonder:  Who is the "our"?