Thanks to Duotrope, a wonderfully useful writer's tool, I've been submitting poetry lately. (Also thanks to Jane Banning, whose works I was searching for when I came across both Verse Wisconsin and Duotrope!) So far 14 poems to five different journals and out of three I've heard back from, one acceptance! Not bad for my first try in years! Verse Wisconsin is a print and online magazine that's been around since 1998, under the title Free Verse, they had to change it when they went online because another ezine had that name already. My poem was accepted for the Spring 2010 online version, which is themed "alternate realities"---who could resist that? Like I told them, my whole life is an alternate reality!
On that note, let me share with you Rainer Maria Rilke's incredible poem You who never arrived, which has to do with my poem; mine refers to the awful possibility that I had not met Jim....now if I could only express myself like Rilke..
You Who Never Arrived
by Rainer Maria Rilke
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me--the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets
that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps
the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...
from Theory.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment