Pumpkin: There are so many different avenues in our minds to associate this noun with visual, olfactory, psychological experiences, not to mention the taste in pies, and as Judith brought up, an infiltration of pumpkin into beer of all things. Of course Halloween came up, and how the Americanization of giant pumpkins has spread worldwide, with people sharing examples from Japan, Romania. Ken brought up that All Hallow's Eve, the night before All Soul's Day (Nov. 1) is still practiced in Germany and Hungary. Judith brought up her experience in Japan in 1989 where the Day of the Dead ( (Obon)) is celebrated in August: little boats with candles were set to travel in a river. When the candle went out, or the boat tipped over, it was though the ancestor had returned from whence he came.
I brought up the adjectives : innocent, rippled, punctured, sunken, carved, green... The verb choices also enhance the variations of what seems overall to be a playful tone. pushed, huddle, (while frost glistens)... can you carry? hug. Graeme piped up about the solo adverb: doubtfully and that one could entitle the poem Humanity. Indeed!
The Silence Afterlight: an ekphrastic response to Lyrical Abstraction” by Rupam Baoni https://rattle.com/the-silence-afterlight-by-patrick-g-roland/
Many wanted to know more about the artist as well as the poet. Apparently the poet is an educator who has systic fibrosis and a story teller. That aside, a very dark poem. For Mary, the poem brought up the memory of burning leaves in Autumn, the smell, sounds, visuals. Rose Marie shared the story of the Refugee Family, who had spent 10 years in different camps, finally in America, and then watching the house in which they lived go up in flames with all their belongings and hard-earned papers.
Some Ekphrastic poems can stand on their own. This one, with the double noun in the title is difficult. We noted in the 4th stanza about the flame and the shadows it casts, how clearly the enjambed reach (of shadows) stretches into space, resolving on the next line never touch.
In the 5th stanza, a surprising conclusion about darkness, "as proof that nothing waits."
As the note from the editor says, there is a sense of possibility as a faith that is never satisfied.
Unanswered prayers, and no answer as ash falls. Ken brought up the poet's choice, that the ash falls like a reply, and Axel underscored that "like" means it is not a reply.
The Dead: from a series of War Sonnets. In the 5th line, "These" curiously could be the hearts of those sent to war, but also the years. Similarly in the 12th line, "He" could refer to Frost, but perhaps an undertone of one of the hearts. Elaine remarked how "all the colors of life" are in the first stanza, but replaced/erased by white in the second. ,Many offered a fuller biography of Rupert Brooks: Yes, handsome and glorified by Henry James and such, but there were other poets in WW1 who are even stronger like Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves[1] " He died of sepsis on a ship in the Aegean as a naval officer; his brother died on the battlefield. This is another of his famous poems:
**
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made a War was return of earth to ugly earth, / War was foundering of sublimities, / Extinction of each happy art and faith / By which the world had still kept head in air’ware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
The reference to The Stranger's Child inspired by a line by Tenneyson also came up.
I had picked it because it was mentioned as the poem tucked in the pocket of Gareth, the husband of the main character in Dictionary of Lost Words. by Pip Williams.
Simic: the first, Fear: In six lines, Simic shows the powerful and scary contagion of fear. Alex brought up the sociological experiment with monkeys where transmission of fear happens, even if a monkey had not experienced the situation provoking it. Judith reminded us the Ash Tree or Quaking Aspen, was used for the crucifixion of Christ.
In Evening, Simic deals with contradiction of the familiar and challenges us with such thinking about how "that which brings you into the world /take you away at death" is one and the same.
How to understand grass. What word or two might it repeat? Is it the same? Perhaps the green of Spring grass, is akin to the grass over a coffin. Judith brought up the tale of King Midas, and the whispering by the reeds telling his secret.
To be in love: As Graeme put it, "I don't think there is a more perfect description". Everything about the experience of love, whether good or bad, stems from the title. The varied length of lines echoes the unpredictable trajectory! The end with the description of losing a loved one,
indeed is both "ghastly" and one is also the other half of a "golden hurt"... She says it all and beautifully. The poem appears in the new section of her "Selected Poems" published in 1963.
[1] War was return of earth to ugly earth, / War was foundering of sublimities, / Extinction of each happy art and faith / By which the world had still kept head in air’
[2] (The imagery in Benjamin's book is inspired by Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus.)
