Original Poem: Nightfalling

Nightfalling
By A.Z. Foreman

The noon-born shadows are long and longer yet.
Long out of bloom and time the oak trees stand.
Fragmented yellow leaves are what is left
Of the mirror that today broke overland.

But bronze and monumentous statues keep
An olden green like something being said,
Standing to reason, and against all seasons,
That in the clouds The Lore Our God is dead.

For in the only-begotten sun of goddamn,
True Judgment Day will come as calm as this:
A carbon sabbath broken in the sky,
And a species writhing on the crucifix
Which high little priests have judas-kissed goodbye.

Heat will be the last word of the sun
And the last leaves be weathered from the willow,
As colors clot as if a will were done
And Man sinks dry like paper turning yellow.

2 comments:

  1.  And man sink dry like paper turning yellow.Even if you make man- Man- this is bad. Why? At your age, or younger, everybody has some windswept music in their aleatory lyrics. 
    You muffed the money-shot.  What happens next? We go back over the whole thing and see it aint our type of Porn at all. 
    Blood, you can be a poet- better muff than being a fuckin philologist believe me. But you gotta deliver on the fucking money shot. 
    Otherwise, by something called backward induction (which is hard-wired in our brains) , your entire ouevre fucking unravels.

    Heat is the last word of the Sun- okay so long as the money-shot is HOT! It isn't. It's about paper yellowing.
    Fuck I care about some fucking Will being signed with, what?, fucking goose quill pens or shit? Where my fucking money shot, Blood? Branches are fucking dithering on a final willow? Why are they bothering to so fucking Jane Austenly fucking dither? Yo! Willow dudes, there aint no money shot. Just some shit about paper turning yellow coz dunno mebbe the guy pees on it or summat.

    The other way to look at this is to take the opening line 'noonborn shadows'- great if you actually live on the fucking Equator and have a fucking flying saucer to track the Sun up and down the fucking Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. You don't. I don't. Nobody does. Yet this portentuous fucking 'Noon born shadows'- who are you actually kidding?

    So you have senile Oaks. But Oaks are in time. They have rings. They are actually fucking emblematic of the passage of time. They may be far out of bloom-  i.e. over a hundred years old- but, at least in English poetry, they are NOT OUT OF TIME IN ANY SENSE. 
    Incidentally, what's with no Capitals for Time as opposed to time etc? What? You learnt that in Etruscan 101 did you? Newsflash- you don't fucking know English. Learn it sometime why don't you?

    Or don't. 
    Most over-rated language ever!  Other than Japanese. Seriously, no great Japanese poem represents a Japanese thought. On the other hand, everything except their poetry is poetic about them guys

    ReplyDelete
  2. You're so CUTE, little one.

    Not only did you forget that "born" has more than one meaning in English, overlook what the "Dry like" does to the image of "paper turning yellow" and fail to see how a cliché is subverted in the final stanza, but you actually chide me for essentially avoiding a cliché with "oak".

    All the criteria by which you attempt to judge this and other poems are so laughably out of touch, your schoolmarmy notions of what constitutes bad/good English so pathetically uninformed, and your addiction to irrelevance so typical of those who cannot be described as "literary" without putting that word in quotation marks, that I find it hard to believe you're not just a clever parodist.

    But no, it's sadly obvious that you are sincere. The invective which you use as a substitute, rather than a supplement, for an actual argument is too unimaginatively executed for a parodist of that caliber.

    You're like a callow adolescent version of Irving Howe or Edward Said. (And yeah I read your comment on my Said review. It's comedic just how much your poorly camouflaged limitations mirror his.)

    Though you may have somehow fooled yourself into believing otherwise, it is abundantly clear to me that you are no lover of language. And no, and your recourse to exploded myths about it doesn't hide that fact so much as expose your dilettantism for what it is.

    Go learn to think.

    ReplyDelete