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saartha

a soft sound
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Nothing

1 min read
can replace
poetry
in my life
and one day
surely
it will


--Ken Mikolowski, 'Nothing' www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/…
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The question of my mother is on the table.
The dark box of her mind is also there,
the garden of everywhere
we used to walk together.

Among the things the body doesn't know,
it is the dark box I return to most:
fallopian city engrained in memory,
ghost-orchid egg in the arboretum,

hinged lid forever bending back and forth —
open to me, then closed   
like the petals of the paperwhite narcissus.
What would it take to make a city in me?

Dark arterial streets, neglected ovary
hard as an acorn hidden in its dark box
on the table: Mother, I am
out of my mind, spilling everywhere.


--Robin Ekiss, 'The Question of My Mother' www.poetryfoundation.org/poetr…
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Nothing worth noting
except an Andromeda
with quadrangular shoots—
         the boots
of the people

wet inside: they must swim
to church thru the floods
or be taxed—the blossoms
         from the bosoms
of the leaves


*


Fog-thick morning—
I see only
where I now walk. I carry
         my clarity
with me.


*


Hear
where her snow-grave is
the You
         ah you
of mourning doves          


--Lorine Niedecker, 'Linnaeus in Lapland' www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/…
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On the Poet: gedwaylem




:icongedwaylem:


gedwaylem is a writer who is constantly holding pieces of herself back. She has a curious restraint that makes her style at once estranging and tender. At heart a minimalist, there is a decided lack of superfluous description in even her longest pieces. Each image is given shape delicately, lingering just long enough to taste. Even pieces in which she seems to be the speaker, she writes as though standing to one side, half turned away. This often leads to a beautiful sense of incompleteness and yearning, poetry in which silence is just important as the words themselves.

She is by no means a traditional rhyming poet, but occasionally she sneaks in off-hand or slant rhymes like a snake in the grass, natural and without agenda. It is this smoothness that is perhaps one of her distinguishing features as a poet—regardless of the topic, gedwaylem rarely defines things in terms of beauty or ugliness, preferring to express things simply as they are. This is particularly evident in several poems about the third side of love—neither content nor discontent, but rather an unbalanced and uncertain sensation of sheer existence.

The final mark of her distinct style is her use of the surreal, using uncanny imagery to say things a thousand pictures couldn’t capture. This is often coupled masterfully with word play and unexpected line breaks, using verbs in though-provoking formations like ‘we survive / each other’.

Perhaps the one line that identifies the feel of gedwaylem’s poetry is this: ‘I say that people are strange and find this to be a lie.’ (fav.me/d3earjc)

Below is a short list of must-read poems from her gallery.

lying on the landingyou picked your
bones from
my face
and collected them in a
corner of static
which we would call every night
just to listen to
weather
(they) turned or not
with our necks being
the only thing
we have
in common
-a house with nothing in it but walls.


________________________________________________________________________

Proposed by :iconmeinesehnsucht: and initiated by :iconpoet-article-project:, the On the Poet project encourages people to write about DeviantArt poets, offering others an introduction to their work and giving these writers some much-deserved attention. A list of previous articles can be found on the group page. If you are interested in participating, please consider joining!
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Quarantine

2 min read
                         LAUDS

Somehow I am sturdier, more shore
than sea-spray as I thicken through
the bedroom door. I gleam of sickness.
You give me morning, Lord, as you
give earthquake to all architecture.
I can forget.
                      
                       You put that sugar
in the melon’s breath, and it is wet
with what you are. (I, too, ferment.)
You rub the hum and simple warmth
of summer from afar into the hips
of insects and of everything.
I can forget.
                  
                           And like the sea,
one more machine without a memory,
I don’t believe that you made me.

                   PRIME

I don’t believe that you made me
into this tremolo of hands,
this fever, this flat-footed dance
of tendons and the drapery

of skin along a skeleton.
I am that I am: a brittle
rib cage and the hummingbird
of breath that flickers in it.

Incrementally, I stand:
in me are eons and the cramp
of endless ancestry.

Sun is in the leaves again.
I think I see you in the wind
but then I think I see the wind.



~Malachi Black, excerpt from Quarantine www.poetryfoundation.org/poetr…
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Featured

Nothing by saartha, journal

The Question of My Mother by saartha, journal

Linnaeus in Lapland by saartha, journal

On the Poet: ~gedwaylem by saartha, journal

Quarantine by saartha, journal