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Click hereHollow eyes in forever shadows
of faceless distress and searing pain,
the gray on gray shades of decay
in lines, long endless lines
as day by day life fades away.
The formless shapes, wire sculptures
of taunted men in twisted frames,
living only breath by breath,
anguished in the scarcity of hope,
suffering in abundance of death.
This disjointed tread of humanity
branches into living and dying rows,
into the cold, into the freeze,
one line walks into the fields,
and the other to the chimneys.
The formless shapes, wire sculptures
of taunted men in twisted frames,
living only breath by breath,
anguished in the scarcity of hope,
suffering in abundance of death.
Forever night, forever darkness,
as nameless numbers scarcely live
day by day in their saturnine
wait for the chambers,
in The Selekcja's long gray lines.
Selekcja is a hybrid Latin and Polish word meaning selection.
This repeat of the second stanza as the fourth is brutal, disorienting.
As if the other repeats weren't enough to install this numbness in your mind.
In the context, the rhyme here is devasting.
"gray on gray"
"day by day"
This makes me feel guilty pushing the thermometer, saying "Loved it" - it is an effective poem.
Offers a claustrophobic ambiance of an arduous and hopeless trapped existence.
I looked up the word before I realized you had a definition at the bottom.
These are very good lines:
The formless shapes, wire sculptures
of taunted men in twisted frames,
This poem will have to be read at least twice by most readers, for it is not until the title's explanation at the bottom that one truly begins to grasp the poem. . . And then, of course, you are forced to read it again to see what was hidden the first time!
An interesting work, thank you.