Monday, April 6, 2009

This is a really cool poem that I read for class...

Parts of Speech

Some stories don't want to be told.
They walk away, carrying their suitcases
held together with grey string.
Look at their disappearing curved spines.
Hunch-backs. Harmed ones. Hold-alls.

Some stories refuse to be danced or mimed,
drop their scuffed canes
and clattering tap-shoes,
erase their traces in nursery rhymes
or ancient games like blind man's buff.

And at this stained place words
are scraped from resinous tongues,
wrung like washing, hung on the lines
of courtroom and confessional,
transposed into the dialect of record.

Why still believe stories can rise
with wings, on currents, as silver flares,
levitate unweighted by stones,
begin in pain and move towards grace,
aerating history with recovered breath?

Why still imagine whole words, whole worlds:
the flame splutter of consonants,
deep sea-anemone vowels,
birth-cable syntax, rhymes that start in the heart,
and verbs, verbs that move mountains?

-Ingrid De Kok

1 comment:

Laura Rollins said...

Thanks for sharing! :) I love reading your blog. It was great seeing you again this last weekend. I hope your weeks goes well, see you this weekend :D