Thursday, August 24, 2006

poetry Thursday


This week's theme is time. My offering...

bare branches

Hours gather, fallen leaves, vibrant
but dying. We long to press them
into bright, talismans. Memory, we pretend,
is surely the moment captured, time held
in amber stillness, beautiful and unaltered.

But days drift and pile into damp mounds.
Beneath they decay, destined to lose themselves
to the earth. Our hands cannot hold them all
or save even the most vivid of moments
from the final, soft dissolve into forgetting.

4 comments:

Left-handed Trees... said...

This poem is so enchanting to me...soothing, it lulls--then, the words really come home and the reader wakes up. "the final, soft dissolve into forgetting..." this line speaks volumes to me.

Lisa Cohen said...

Ahhh lovely, Dale, especially this:

"Beneath they rot, destined to lose themselves
to the earth. Our hands cannot hold them all"

I forgot it was thursday! Need to get writing.
:)

Jim Brock said...

What a lovely, wise turn in the second stanza, and it all so finely lined, subtly imaged, and exactly phrased: beautiful.

mareymercy said...

Some great lines here - "flat
bright, talismans" and "the final, soft dissolve into forgetting" in particular.