After the Rain
dedicated to my mother
The scent is familiar,
A mixing,
Blending
Of clean cut grass
and damp earth.
I almost, alomst forgot how to smell.
Days pass and go, while we,
timeless statues, only see
the worth of our sculptor
once the clay has dried.
Drained protions
of grilled cheese lie on a
shattered, dust infected memory.
And water seeps throuhg the
stern blockade
of worn, black boots.
Worms progress from the ground,
while righteous cars take back
to the dangerous roads,
and I realize…
You don’t seem happy.
Blue eyes, so serious,
laughter forgotten in your other pocket,
washed and wrinkled,
too damaged to be useful.
An uneven calm over takes
our stubborn steps.
And like children, we retreat
from the damp.
copyright 2005 Casey O'Malley
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sorry I commented back like this, but I take my poetry very personally, and this poem perticular. thank you for the comments, though.....and sorry about the typos....bad habit.
worms and cars....
have you ever noticed that when it rains,worms come up from the ground?
well, I remember in third grade we used to yell at the bus driver when she ran over worms in the road...there was nothing we could do about it, kind of like how the sculpter is carving statues.....but we felt the need to argue about it....
and I guess I am abstract, but the poem needs to be read aloud. Most of my poems have a very slow, lazy pace to them....
timeless is used as a analogy/illusion/metaphor (sp?).....I forget which.
timless is solid,unchangable, like statues.....
and from our birth asa statue to when the clay has dried, we complain and we bicker and we fight with the sculpter, be he/they God, our parents or our teachers.....see it now?
It's very interesting.
Firstly: What in the world is a "protion" in the third stanza? I'm thinking it's a typo for protein or portion, but which?
Secondly: In the first stanza, the repetition of "almost" is awkward. I'd suggest ditching the second almost.
Thirdly: On the second stanza, you throw off the scheme and toss in a rhyme. Only other gripe on Stanza #2 is that no, humans really are not timeless. If anything, we're about as short-lived as a butterfly :p
Fourthly: Grill cheese dust-infected memory. I like the "infected memory" bit because I do.
And then suddenly you're talking about (I'm assuming) rubber boots. And then a typo. I feel like I have to point those out, gomen >>U
Fifthly: You are rather...abstract, I suppose, to put it politely. What do grilled cheese and earthworms have to do with how the target of this poem feels? More importantly, how do they relate to each other here, along with cars? It simply doesn't work.
Sixthly: I like your metaphor on "laughter forgotten in your pocket". It gives the impression that the person has been through so much in their life, and they're tired and worn. Excellent imagery.
Seventhly: The only thing wrong here is the rhythm. It sounds so choppy. Try lengthening the second and fourth lines in that stanza.
Eighthly: Casey-san, try posting some of your most recent poetry. Judging from the little block of text at the bottom of the poem, you wrote it in '05, two years ago. It's hard to get a grip on your level of skill in poetry when you're showing us stuff from two years ago :p
I'm not the best poetry critic, but I hope that helped
~Sumi