In the morning
First light appears across the fields
The first bird calls out,
Heralding the arrival of
a new day
A decade prior
Looking out across the vast ocean
above the breaking waves.
Foam gathers into shapes and places
People I knew,
and buildings long gone
Another wave breaks,
breaking brick and mortar stores.
Waves going back out to sea.
I remember walking by them,
when the sea was calm,
the wild beast tamed at last.
Remembering a time before,
Waves break,
Bricks break,
Falling fast.
I remember these places
Tall and Powerful,
Forever looming large, but
from dust to dust,
They are called.
Down they stumble,
Standing no more,
and I am left to pick up the pieces,
and watch the waves fall away.
In nearly every class period so far, I have read poems by authors that I had never heard before. From this weeks list, the only name that stood out was Sylvia Plath’s and I knew that I wanted to dive deeper into the other poets. Galway Kinnell may not have seemed to be my first choice, but something about his poems kept drawing me back in until I conceded and crafted my creative piece based on a poem that he wrote. Kinnell was often seen as a disciple of Whitman who focused on self-actualization through the real world and the real self instead of becoming lost in the magic of fairytales. Kinnell served in many capacities in his life with a notable stay as the poet laureate of Vermont which helped to further his career. While I appreciated all that he wrong, the poem that stuck out the most to me was “Another Night in the Ruins” which focuses on the art of coming to realizations on our own even when the dots can be hard to connect. While his poetry was largely on the same playing field as Walt Whitman’s, the appreciation for his work was significantly less which is often attributed to the images and themes that he used to convey his thought on the destructive nature of humans in both localized areas, but also across the world.
I was inspired by Kinnell’s poem, “Another night in the Ruins” which not only focuses on the ruins of an ancient place, but also the ruins of certain relationships as well. A reflective piece that was designed to focus on what Kinnell had loved and lost throughout his life and work.
I modeled my poem after what I felt were some of the most important lines from the original poem while also focusing around what I believe to be the major points of the poem. I wanted to start in a similar way where the poem focuses on what around in nature and the roles that these natural aspects might place within the poem. The poem frequents the idea that happy endings are hard to come by and sometimes the happiness can be found in the small things wherever we go. For my own poem, I tried to contrast what I saw with what Kinnel saw while also sticking to the theme of the poem.
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