Yes, my fifteen or so loyal readers, I missed any sort of blogging action last week. Kellie and I went to the annual Arkansas Community College (ACC) conference in Hot Spring, Arkansas for the first time in at least a dozen years. The conference was a bit disappointing. I don't know what has happened to ACC in the dozen years or so since we have been away, but it is a mere shell of what it was back in the glory days. Sad, really! However, Hot Springs is always a few hours worth of fun and things to do even if you don't gamble--and I don't.
Anyway, I was preparing to head to the ACC conference last week and also had a ton of grading, so I ran out of time to write a blog. It didn't matter. I didn't have a poem to present.
Today, I have two poems. The first poem goes with the picture above. On our daily hike one afternoon, I noticed how the sun was at a particular angle so that the light seemed to be slanting through the trees. I was afraid that I would not be able to capture this "slanting" very well, but the pictured captured the effect fairly accurately up close. The "slanting" in the distance is not as true as I had hoped.
As I continued walking, of course, I was thinking about how I could write a poem about this slanting. I knew right away that Emily Dickinson has a famous poem about the "There's a certain slant of light," (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45723/theres-a-certain-slant-of-light-320), which means that I knew that any light-slanting poem would be compared to hers, so I just leaned into it. If my poem must be compared with hers, why not bring her poem into it? By the way, I did change her first line because of metrical purposes, not because I don't know the line. Anyway, all but the last stanza of my poem was "written" in my head before I got home and reread Ms. Dickinson's poem. Her poems influence on mine is only in the last stanza and the words that I sort of stole for the first and last verse. Please read her poem along with mine. ENJOY!
A Certain Slant of Light
There is a certain slant of light,
The lady poet said.
I think that she is right because
It angles through my head
And rattles through the oak trees’ leaves
And spears the sodden ground,
Then topples sheaves of golden sedge
And flees without a sound.
It squeezes through some hollow reeds,
Yet it rasps no whistles
But files the tips of black thorns on
Hoary-headed thistles.
It latches on the sweet gums’ balls
And flickers on their tines,
Then burns the backs of grazing cows
And glistens on their spines.
There is a certain slant of light
I should not watch pass by
But when I do I hold my breath
And hope that I don’t die.
Yep! She brought Death into the poem. I probably would not have thought of it, but it makes sense in the grand scheme of things. The last stanza reminds me of the altar scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Speaking of death...as I told readers before, the crow brothers poems are ditties that I make up whenever I see what the three crow brothers are up to at the fairgrounds/city park area when I go walking. The other day, Luna and I happened upon a dead crow lying close to a dumpster, and the dead dumpster crow was the subject of the day's thought. Never fear! The dead crow wasn't one of the three crow brothers. They are very much alive and still hanging out together. However, because it is what I saw and what got stick in my head, in the poem today, one of the three crow brothers is dead. Don't worry! We can always bring him back to life whenever we want. ENJOY!
The Three Crow Brothers: A Death in the Family
There’s only two crow brothers
A sittin’ head-to-head.
They’re looking down onto the ground
Where brother three lies dead.
They seem to be all ruffled,
A thinkin’ what he’s done
And wondering how their brother found
The wrong end of a gun.
Where did he go? What did he do?
What brought some human there
To seek their darling brother out
And pluck him from the air?
And I myself grew troubled
Seeing the crows so sad,
But then the murder all arrived,
Six sisters, mom, and dad.
The oak tree held a dozen crows
A blamin’ like they do.
They thought that I had killed their boy.
I told’em it was you.
I haven't heard from any more readers about what they think about Uncle Boog and the Dogfight. I haven't looked in a while to see how it's selling. Make sure to get a copy however you can.
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