Thursday, May 27, 2010

Rain in a Forest of Leaves


The cannon sounds, their eyes strike sparks,
the cavalry stampeding quickens
and tastes water spilled like blood.

From the woods, from the night,
to wage war on the doldrums and secure
the virgin beauty of the light of a hundred streetlamps
and the loyalty of an endless armada,
the breath of a ceiling of stars.

The cold of their cries comes first;
then the crash of the light in their eyes, then the sound.
The cavalry drums to itself and it quickens and quickens,
it follows the voices of windchimes and trains

running fast before day.


1 comment:

  1. Not to sound like an idiot or anything, but it took me a painfully long time to get this one. But that's not particularly unusual, I'm bad at grasping overarching concepts. This one's just a little bit worse than normal.

    However, once I got it I was really impressed. The metaphor is really well developed. I always find that hard to do because it's so hard to find a metaphor with so many paralleling elements in the first place.

    I looooooove the second stanza. "to wage war on the doldrums" and "the breath of a ceiling of stars" are beautiful on their own, and even better when they're in context and their meaning as a part of the poem can be understood.

    Maybe it's just me, but (if I understand the sentence correctly) the idea that the breath of a ceiling of stars is there to wage war on the doldrums is just a poetic concept in and of itself, and straight up interesting. It makes you want to try and find that phenomenon. I love it.

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