It’s another fiction Monday, focusing on poetry. I have been invited to present poetry at the University of Mary-Hardin Baylor’s Writer’s Festival in February, based on a few snippets of work I have completed in the past, so I’m now taking some time to draft a few new pieces to accompany my presentation. Here is another poem in progress, a new one this turn.
Fire in the Lungs
I breathed the heat of my soul into the cold of the Earth
and watched it fall as snow and ash,
a kind of atonement for the dancing and the drinks,
the lies that were whispered and the swan song melodies,
the scrawled prose and metered memories fading like candles
on the altar we built to Vesta in our far off corner at the end of the world.
I hewn a ship for us from fallen pines that littered paths
less taken and obscure, travelled forth but never back,
shadowy places and listless dreams, promises and folklore,
a ferry to take us to the summer country and the land of the dawn,
where the days enfold one upon the other and time is a muse like
the other sisters and dances without stop and needs no pause or rest.
I took the pen and set about the story upon the elder pages
and fashioned there a kind of fiction,
the reasoned words of ethical discourse in their luscious sum,
claims of proof and integrity and their full-formed honesty,
the end of all things summarized in the most tenderly formed
pronouncement with delicate certainty, conviction, and endurance.
Death was beautiful, if brief.
© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.
