Last Saturday I was chatting with two fellow poets and a seminary classmate on social media at the same time. One was in India, another in Spain, and the third in Indiana. Afterwards I had jet lag!
Probably the best part of the writing side of me is being in contact with people, and in a few special circumstances, connecting with people beyond the "Nice write!"-hit-the-1-button sort of thing.
Usually I remember when I first met the people special to me. I can remember seeing my wife on our first date long ago in Virginia. My longest-friendship began in an 8th grade Reading class in Pennsylvania. Poetically speaking, about three years ago S.L. Weisend and I met while commenting on a posting about T.S. Eliot.
Something one of us said (and here I uncharacteristically cannot remember the details) caused the other to comment. In the back-and-forth we discovered that we both lived in New Mexico and miss it very much and that we were in Orange County, CA at the same time but were not at all in the same circles. Maybe it was a poem about New Mexico that piqued my interest in the person and the poetry.
For a while we co-moderated The Writerly Digest on Facebook, but now Writerly Digest carries on just fine without me. https://www.facebook.com/sweisend?fref=ts I always learn so much from it. S.L. and I share a lot of literary and cultural tastes, a love of some of the same places, but also have backgrounds that complement the other's.
Tonight S.L. posted a poem that literally blew me away. It is a new style and one of the best I have read from my friend and fellow poet. A Really Neat Thing is that I have permission to share it with you right here! Thanks, S. L.!
Reflections of an Antihero
Am I insane
because history makes me cry,
Or, that I am incessantly thinking
about those women & men
who fought for love instead of long life?
Those who are gone now,
like the innocence of infants once birthed,
Or the great booming laugh of a Goddess stifled
beneath three billion pounds of dead Earth.
The freedom-reapers, the misanthropes,
The ones who loved the human race,
despite its addiction to misleading hope — All of them gone.
The ones who loved the dog,
despite the dog’s love for its master’s rope
— Gone gone gone..
I know that life appears rosier in rear-view mirrors
where heroes are mere reflections.
But, then, there is the case of my own reflection,
which I keep inside my purse like a concealed weapon
allowing its ascendance only to witness
the made-up visage of my rosy namesake,
as its attached body is chaperoned through the century
in the comfort of a well-maintained hearse.
S.L. Weisend ~ © 2015
Am I insane
because history makes me cry,
Or, that I am incessantly thinking
about those women & men
who fought for love instead of long life?
Those who are gone now,
like the innocence of infants once birthed,
Or the great booming laugh of a Goddess stifled
beneath three billion pounds of dead Earth.
The freedom-reapers, the misanthropes,
The ones who loved the human race,
despite its addiction to misleading hope — All of them gone.
The ones who loved the dog,
despite the dog’s love for its master’s rope
— Gone gone gone..
I know that life appears rosier in rear-view mirrors
where heroes are mere reflections.
But, then, there is the case of my own reflection,
which I keep inside my purse like a concealed weapon
allowing its ascendance only to witness
the made-up visage of my rosy namesake,
as its attached body is chaperoned through the century
in the comfort of a well-maintained hearse.
S.L. Weisend ~ © 2015
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