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[av_heading heading=’NO FILTER | Juvenilia’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY RHICK LARS VLADIMER ALBAY
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Saturday, April 8, 2017
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SYLVIA Plath’s Admonition remains one of my favorite poems. Short and sweet, its opening verse goes: “If you dissect a bird / To diagram the tongue / You’ll cut the chord / Articulating song”.
I would later find out this was a “juvenilia” piece of hers – compositions produced in the artist’s or author’s youth. Which mean, Plath may have grown to hate it – as most writers reading their earlier work often scoff, blush or feel mortified.
As French author Paul Valéry said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
I’m sharing a few of the poetry I wrote as a high school student, which in the near future may or may not embarrass me.
***
Windy Day, Watercolor Sky
The wind flips through my notebook
Of poems I’ve never shared
And to her low whispers and hums
I listen, as she reads back to me
Words I once wrote and bled
I imagine stanzas sprout little wings
And you lend to them flight
Carrying them farther and farther away
Against the watercolor sky
The wind and I wait for clouds
To paint themselves on dimming canvas
Brushstrokes that bleed shades of red
As the sun slowly sinks into the sea
Embers that spread over a masterpiece
And the wind did perfectly sing
Last verses and closing scenes
As above us the sky caught fire
She gently closed my notebook
And handed it back to me
***
Worlds Drowned
Sleepless eyes search the sea for light,
only to look up and see stars,
dying a million lightyears away
One by one, you have succumbed
to the soft song of waves
Leaving me listening,
to your soundless breaths and to
the water that beckons reply
Your tired bodies beside me,
Ebb and flow on the damp sand,
Finally finding a moment of rest
in our of endless laughter
All too turbulent, now halted calm
like the sea that lulls itself to sleep
On your back you lay, closed eyes
fixated on the black sky
perhaps where you project your dreams
of crossing oceans and conquering seas
unaware of the darkness that surrounds us now
The tides dance to the pull of the moon
slowly rising unto shore’s open lap
but you remain in your worlds drowned
I wait, for I surely know
when water’s first gentle kiss touches your feet
and pulls away grains of sand from beneath your soles
you shall wake, and side by side
we’ll watch the sea stir and begin its motions
As clouds let pass hints of dawn/PN
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