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Friday, December 17, 2010

Dead Woman Dance for Big Tent Poetry

Big Tent Poetry prompts: Write a “dead man” poem springboarding from Marvin Bell











Dead Woman Dance

she tap-danced her dreams
triggering them on smoke and glass
watched the futures come and go
like Escher stairs on lies of past

a global bonfire
took her down that lonesome road
where puissance splintered legacies
lost existence to the eclipse

a new dark took the land apart
to relearn how to make a wheel
she beheld her dreams
collapse and smolder on the pyre

 
 
A Fractal Image
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21 comments:

mark said...

Very vivid and a delight to read.

Kristen Haskell said...

Craving a self examined change that I do right now, I am almost ready to leave my old ways on a global bonfire and watch them smolder on the pyre.

Naquillity said...

i love both your poem & your fractal. i've been intrigued by this prompt and may have to explore it myself. hope all is well. have a great day.

flaubert said...

Susan this is a delight to read, just like Mark said.
Pamela

gautami tripathy said...

What a pleasure to read this!

dead man and his shoe painting

Anonymous said...

Very powerful ending. Nicely done.

Gordon Mason said...

Excellent poem, particularly liked the inner rhymes in
"puissance splintered legacies
lost existence to the eclipse"

eyeography said...

Beautiful imagination..
:)

Cynthia Short said...

Quite an apocalyptic, mesmerizing piece here! Loved it!

Elizabeth said...

I found a sense of wistfulness here, a slow walk into another world of both feature and understanding. Especially liked the last stanza.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth said...

Almost forgot, I really liked the image.

Elizabeth

Wayne Pitchko said...

nice read indeed....thanks for sharing these words

Joseph Harker said...

An awesome reinterpretation... and as always, the image you chose to reflect your words fit so perfectly. I love those splintered legacies, especially.

irene said...

A delicate dance between movement and "a pyre of dreams"..

Deb said...

The first stanza was fabulous with the grey and glass and Escher stair. The dead woman has her work cut out for her, and manages!

hedgewitch said...

A great deal packed into your short phrases; for some reason, perhaps the dancing theme, I saw the word legacies as containing the word leg on every read(??)and splintered too. An odd image, as if your dancer was an old-style wooden clothespin made in two halves, coming apart.

Anyway, I'm totally sober, and liked your poem. Thanks for always coming by my place and leaving your thoughts.

Robin said...

Ooh, love this!

WAS said...

There's a lot going on here! And sonically it kinda flies off the page. "Time is the fire" as Delmore Schwartz said, and yours was the best use of that motif in the dead man collection. I'm glad I stopped by here.

brenda w said...

Beautiful! Exquisite use of language. I love the first two and the last two lines. Wonderful work.

Tilly Bud said...

This was an intersting response to the prompt.

James said...

I love the image of smoke and glass and the words bonfire and pyre. I imagine the dead woman burned at the stake and somehow she's not afraid... she knows she's right. Powerful stuff.