prefer it if I fought?
push back
while you push on
my body
worn from battle
finger tips
pitter patter
down my spine
like the rain
on the window pane
tears of pain
gently rough
fighting back
had enough
get off of me
out of me
out of my head
figurative fight
literal bed
©Tia L. Clarke 2008
1 comment:
This might be better than anything I have ever written.
This I envy for its rhythm and beauty - for its texture and for how it integrates all the poetic, artistic tricks it plays.
In Western music, you have the whole note, down to about a sixteenth or maybe a thirty second note. When the note is too quick though, I think it is represented by tremolo, like the trembling or rustling of leaves. Somehow, that is experienced, that is achieved in this poem, the way you make rhyme rustle - like wind through a chime upon a porch, or like tambourines.
This poem is at once sacred and profane or not profane but erotic. How have you learned to write retaliation poetry beautifully, without it being bile or vomit, without resorting stripping and shitting in public, as it were? Here you retaliate but you remember that you are an artist whose posture and aim are the beautiful.
This poem, my dear is a very lofty achievement. Thirty-six or so such poems and you'd have written one of the most beautiful books in the region - indeed in any region. Such a shift in you verse, my dear girl, I'd say, is a miracle. This is very high art. It surpasses your wonderful “Forty Cents”. I am in awe.
"I have not aborted anything". Here you prove that you haven't - that you hadn't.
What I envy is that for a collection of such poems, you might have publishers clamoring to release your work, a response I have long desired to my own work.
I want publisher to come looking for us - not unlike the way they come to these islands - to our shores, looking for athletes to clothe in scholarships and contracts. What a day that will be.
What will cause it to come though, is when we have more than Marion and Christian and Asha and Ian and me and Patti and Pat and Charles and Telcine and Dickson Wasake [who is leaving] and Christine Wilson and Eric Rose and Erin Green - now we have Tia, praise the Lord.
We need a community of writers, recognized and respected nationally as well as internationally. We need publishing companies, agents and world distribution.
These possibilities are what "Crumpled Silk Sheets" make me know, must and will come to pass. Let it be soon, Lord, I say. Thanks to God for you, fellow-poet, for your contribution and dedication.
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