I'm not too sure if what I submitted for consideration is exactly up to standard. I tend to look at my poetry and be horribly self-conscious about it, especially when I've never written in that particular style before... hopefully they weren't too tragic this time around though. I decided to try a couple of different ideas - namely with or without a plot. Current pieces that were offered:
(Sappho Risen)
When memory encased you
in the hot silence of a tomb,
still you would not sleep.
Alexandria loved you once:
Fond words, gentle songs
filled your summer island, and beyond.
When your temple crumbled
to ash, arthritic and bone-weary, you
were struck dumb, banished
to suffocating dark.
You lay –
under sand
under coffin
under linen
under skin –
For thousands of years.
Mouthpiece lost,
You moved in silent dismay
From the mouths and hearts of scholars, to
The desiccated chest of a kitchen hand, a gardener, a housecat.
Those lonely spaces drew you,
Pieces, fragments of
Love lost, love kindled.
You remained, the pulse beneath
A dry chest: impossible, relentless,
patient. Dreaming of the sun,
Until, finally, bloated with years, you were
expunged from the sands;
not living, but never dead.
A sorry sight, of course –
You wreck of ancient eloquence -
but though your
quiet hosts lay forgotten,
you were cradled in the most tender of hands:
wounded by graveworm hunger,
you limp among us again.
The other poem is more wandering in focus, rather than an homage to the focus of my thesis. I kind of like how it turned out, even if in terms of plot it's fairly pedestrian:
(Only the beginning)
You sad, wet thing. Knock-kneed disintegration.
Your animal-drive scramble for half-life
does not frighten me,
Death’s starving posterchild!
Thick chunks of putrid meat
– your rot and ruin –
hit the floor with fat splats:
sombre and somehow ridiculous.
Nothing excessive is carried.
Where fantastical epigrams have spoken
of morbid, eternal beauties, curtaining
Porcelain skin with
Hair and wings and tongue and teeth
Of a glorious, hulking beast:
Romantic carnivore, ethereal predator.
yours is the true shapeshift, all
smoke and blood and madness.
Humanity decanted, you are real in your
grotesque glory -
Life and death in one.
Meat turns to food turns to life turns to meat.
Rabid beast turns on its maker,
but I am not Frankenstein to shy from my child.
