a descent into poetry insanity |
the bells toll across the world, silently, through numbers that tick upward day by day. I watch them grow, rising, ballooning, exploding into stratospheric heights in our empty landscapes, and wonder. is it so different for us than Donne? in his day, bodies lined up like cords of wood, stacked deep and flea- ridden, and he felt the loss in his ears and heart like a sparrow pecking a grain of sand from a mountaintop, "a clod . . . washed away by the sea." how much harder to remember, when death is a number rising on the screen, that “any man's death diminishes me.” I am less, so much less. I feel the emptiness of their loss, like drops of blood exuding from my fingertips until I ache and tire, pints too low to function. I close my eyes and hold on to them, the numbers I do not know—the Papas and Nanas Grampys and Grammys, Boos and Princes, Pumpkins and Meemaws—so many names. so many stories. so many endings that should not have come so quickly, and I wish that the bells would toll in my ears. it's wrong to let them pass in silent numbers on my screen. line count: 29 April 29: poem embedding a quoted phrase (& cite it) From a sermon by John Donne that includes this passage: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/no-man-is-an-island/ |