It reminded me of when I was illegally employed as a gardener in Vancouver, which was absolutely enchanting until the beautiful fall ended and winter began. I was looking forward to all of the famous Canadian ice and snow but Vancouver just does freezing cold rain. We are building fishponds and laying footpaths in the freezing cold rain, and our boss goes: "This separates the men from the boys, eh?" We told him yeah, the men want to go home.
Could be a poem about the doomed relationship between me and that boss.
So, how did you know all about that? Who's been talking eh?
This has a great rhythm to it. There is the subtle & not so subtle rhyme playing off one another in just enough measure to keep the poem persistent, as seasons can be when they're changing. There's always that period where they seem to be so at odds with each other, fighting for control over the weather.
The questioning & pleading & final response is a good touch, as is the way you say what is immediately followed with what is not: "We are silent rains/no summer thunder." for example.
I also love this "We are burnt" line that hangs before falling into the actual colors. Just a really neat transition there. Two suggestions would be to leave out the "a" in "a fading drama". I also found the second to last line awkward. "It is vanished" might sound better as "It has vanished".
I like how this plays on the seasons to describe that fading relationship. It's funny because Autumn is a time of comfort and renewal for me, which I know goes against the grain, so I tend to think of it in a positive light, something that I truly look forward to.
So, reading this I had to take a minute to reassess my own feelings about the seasons and place myself into the speaker's shoes - insomuch as that is possible. I find the metaphor very effective in that way, because it allows me to transcend my own ideas about these things and understand the waning that is occurring- the rift that has settled between the two parties.
My favorite lines, I think, come at the end with a kind of drop and crush sensation:
It is vanished in the wind of falling leaves
And I am waiting for ice to come.
- but also there's this knowing that settles- the idea that it is as certain as the changing of the seasons that the ice will arrive, perhaps we are just hoping we can prolong it.
i wonder if the sound of surf and sea and the green were ever there...this sounds like a relationship which never quite got grounded..or maybe like a plane with a bad engine was grounded from the start...
we never had the pure heat..we were autumn's chill in the making from the very start.
doomed to the icy feeling of winter...and it is coming fast.
nice parallel of the fading drama and the fading colors of autumn...
Well, I should make my apologies first, along with others you are someone I should read more, so, I can't say "you are getting better" because I haven't read all your work, but it seems so.
I like that this poem has a repetition.
To me it seems like metrical poetry, like blank verse because of the way it is presented) but certainly there is rhyme there.
So, you establish You and I, we are. Those are two powerful things.
We are
We are
We are
We are
umber/thunder
no summer thunder. Silent rains
'and only I see'
I like that, it draws you out of those rhythms which kind of lull you because they are examples, it comes as a surprise and draws you out in a visceral way / relating to the cold. isolated.
I like the
Where
Where
Where deal, when it relate it back to:
'We are warm or cool,
never pure heat.'
it makes me feel as if the person/s are elemental,
the way it takes experiences to make up a cold, after love there is great dullness and I am made of grey stuff.
So, when all read all that and let it work its logic my way, I really like the key of those key moments, at points the words stand tall and (going back a bit) it reminds me of the end scene of the movie Krull where (evil has been defeated) and the screen becomes elongated and slightly distorted, it's like you go through all of those trials (along with them) and then, as a result, life is changed again.
At key points that is happening here. I like the way the poem changes from ambiance into wetness and chill, how it is sad and actual, factual, found in nature,
I think I like most the could bes in this, could be that clarity is part of the chill, that holding of something precious, that understanding that there are no withs without, spring, summer, without autumn, those experiences amplified or indented into a heart or felt upon the skin,
and cataloged
and cataloged
and cataloged
and cataloged
until I, We
becomes this, then.
The lines are blurred, that way the ice could hold a summer.
I don't know, instead of 'like' it seems as if these people fade into description, and there's something very personal, and real, and primordial about that.
Submission Name: No Summer Thunder
