Dried Summer Grass

blew my mind away ! Excellent work , thnx for sharin' & 5-ed !

and very inspirational because of the imagery :)

Clear, sad, but even a bit hopeful. I wondered at the tragedy until I read your comments - then it hit home and I felt your pain. The ashes in the wind painting pictures - yes, perfect - but the surprise at surviving even more so. Excellent

First of all my thanks to Pelegrino, Oneiria, Todski and Greenmountaineer for their comments. A particular thank you to Todski & Greenmountaineer for their detailed and enormously constructive advice. Far from resenting them I am absolutely thrilled with them.

This poem, like most I have entered, was written a long time ago (‘ Letter’ & ‘Spiced Lamb’ are new) at a time of great turmoil for me. I had fallen deeply & hopelessly for a girl (‘Hands’) & in the aftermath wrote this. I showed her ‘Dried Summer Grass’, she liked it and we became friends for some time (but no more). She was an extremely gifted artist and I still have several of her pictures on the wall. There were other issues in my life then that I had no way of resolving – as I was missing a vital piece of information. The result, as about the only way I had of dealing with it all, was a number of poems - many of which, like this one, still have a lot of emotion attached for me.

So it has been hard for me to stand back from them. Actually, to be truthful, I find it hard to stand back from the new ones too. So, like I said, I really appreciate the assessment and advice.

So in response. Greenmountaineer, I found your comment on the stress on the endings an immensely useful insight. I agree it is better with ‘sit softly’ & if I ever showed it again would incorporate that change & the dropped comma. Todski. I think I prefer your breaking down of the lines and some of the reductions.

But (a dreadful word) I think dropping ‘The’ before fires suggest ‘Lives are made of tinder which means occasionally you might get fires’ whereas what I think I was trying to say with the very definite article was ‘lives are made of tinder and you bloody well get fires’. The word ‘blind’ is critical to what I was trying to describe and ‘strange’ also.

So what I was trying to say was that when something like this hits you – you go mad, it blinds you and afterwards everything is shaken up and lots of strange ideas come to you as you struggle unsuccessfully to come to terms with it all. Having started the metaphor, I tried to make it work and be real in its own right – so I have no precise significance for ashes, eddies etc. The ‘sitting in the pale morning’ came from one morning after I had been on an all night patrol in South Armagh some years before - and I was sitting and it was a very pale morning. What exactly the connection is I am unsure but that does tie into some of the other issues I mentioned. ‘Waiting for a sign’ – the words just came and they still make me shiver.

I hugely value the comments, even where not agreed with, in making me think and see the poem afresh – I was too close. Again, thank you very much.

A very elegant expression of the contrast between permanence and transience.