readingredhead | (no subject)

We are the music makers, the ones
who take the silence and bend our ways
around it so that somehow (we still don't know how) we produce
a song, a shout, a cry into the night.
But whatever it is, it's worth it.
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
picking up driftwood aimlessly -- maybe
to construct a house in the sand,
furnished with sea-glass windows that filter the light in
green and brown and blue.
And sitting by desolate streams; places quiet
like that are in short supply
now. "Alone" is not a bad word.
World-losers and world-forsakers --
after all, it's just a world, a mere phsycial
reality, and physicality's not always
something to be craved --
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems. Because who else
cares to move the world, nowadays? You'd be hard-pressed
to come up with a good answer to
that question. So it's up to us. It's up
to us.

*************************************************

Words in italics comprise the first stanza of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's poem "Ode." Anything not in italics is mine.

I really wish someone would take "Ode" and set it to music so that I could sing it out loud in joy.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Who cares about physicality? I agree, man.

Exactly.

Also: it now occurs to me what a great way to start poetry this was. That is, if you write "normal" poetry. The rare times I use verse, it comes out very different from anything I've read...

Thanks. I was thinking about this poem because I'd just dug up my printed copy of it while looking for something else entirely. So when I wanted to write, the poem was still in my head, and instead of ignoring it, I decided to use it.