If I die in violence,
As my mother foretold,
It’s because I was not born;
I was created.
Carved from supple greenwood,
Bent by shattered bone,
Knapped with flinty knowledge,
I am taut as twisted sinew drawn
To the echo of good and evil,
Held quivering like sin.
Until I am finally loosed upon this world,
Sent speeding toward temptation
Poised unwisely on its head.
Piercing the mirror of soulless beauty,
Lodging between rib and breast,
Blowing agony into ashen memories
With each angry, sticky breath.
The bruised fruit
Of two wounded trees
Fallen beyond their
War-torn garden wall.
Blinded by a glimpse of Eden,
My vision never to return.
© 2023 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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I started this one at 2 a.m. on the Sunday of Kitten*Con 2022: Poetry. A busy little witching hour that weekend.
The inspiration for the first stanza had been hanging around my draft files for a while because I didn’t know what to do with it.
My mother told me from a very young age that she was convinced that I would die in violence, specifically of a gunshot wound. I don’t know whether hers was a foreseeing or a foreswearing. But I tell my wife that it’s not too late.
This was a poem that started in one direction, based on my retelling friends about an incident that happened when I was nineteen (“I’m nine-fucking-teen; I don’t know where I got this.”). I thought about a recitation of events but decided I had done that before and didn’t want to do it again. So, my sleep-addled mind took it in a new direction.
I was up and down three times over the next two hours between scribbling notes on a pad by the bed and in the dining room until I finally went to the office and transcribed those fractured lines into a draft on a scrap piece of paper. Unlike most of my poems, that was the final format pretty much in one throw. But then I spent the next few days changing a word here, a comma there, a line-ending elsewhere.
While I was in the editing process, I noticed a dual meaning in the closing line. I didn’t intend that when I wrote it but loved the happy accident when I stumbled upon it.
The title is derived from the Old English meaning of my name.
Picture notes:
ReplyDeleteI’ve always said, to draw something you need to really look at it. That’s still true. And while I’ve looked at apples before, drawing one is different. I started with a circle, squashed it, then had to figure out the skin. It’s not just red. Speckling the apple's surface was harder than I expected. The greenish spots had to be molded and shaped, then draped across the skin. It took multiple tries. As always, the highlights and shadows on the apple only synced up when I applied the 3D effect to the overall shape. The leaves were tougher, trying to match the light direction with something that looks 3-dimensional. As with other illustrations, there are a lot of gradients as well as masks and blurs.
This one was my favorite, perhaps because I've been reading a lot of the retellings/expansions of Greek myths that are flying around right now. This seems very much in that tone of altered perspectives. Well done!
ReplyDelete