And this was the shape of her desire:
To be a white bird beating its wings against night.
Beating until that was all. To be. Yet not the bird. Or night. Or the air. Or the beating.
To be a white bird.
Chris Abani
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Not gloriously, but sadly, hanging on,
the White Ship trembles at the verge of dawn.
The Paper Albatross dips, and reveals
(in the White wings) a Whiteness that conceals.
'No way home against the wind!' taunts porpoise,
the while sharks nibble madly at the corpus
delicti, and some Whale-Judge from a Black sea
steams at the universe of poetry.
Words whirled, the White Words, vanish without trace.
Moray's a bailiff with a yawning face.
Anemone greets Hydra in the jury;
both bored, they stifle yawns — it's an old story,
Brueghel's Icarus uttering once again
(this time in verse) the solitude of pain.
The Judge, of course, has heard it all before;
he thinks, in fact, that poetry is a bore
And has no business standing at the bench.
He wanders. He dreams of some fluky wench,
and hears, at a great distance, his Brothers singing.
He is the Whale, and the White Ship winging
Its hapless course is surface-bound forever,
chaste in the wind — the wind that whispers 'Never!'
to all who plead the case of the raped poem,
the Word that, wounded, cannot find its home.
*************
It's a poem I wrote 20 years ago, and the image brings it back to my mind. Thanks for that. Lovely image. Bump to 9 from me.
I find this image a bit too abstract and obscure to fit the bill for this challenge theme. Came back to this image for another look. I think I see a lighthouse and a seagull. But the whole image is just too blurry for me. I actually get a bit cross-eyed looking at it. I am sure you had your own reasons for presenting it this way though.
This image makes me want to stare at it until things come into focus. I think it helps if I cross my eyes and squint a little. The essence of a moment in time.
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