Sunday, 16 March 2014

Blown Away


.

Waiting for a Murmuration: photo by Vicki Reed (holgagirl), 10 February  2014


ephemeral as tinkerbell 
unmoored yet not unmoved
tossed cloudward, flipped
 ...............sans volition
into the flow 

going but not wanting to go
without the other flotsam




Windswept. Holga image. Encaustic: Rice paperwood, wax. damar resin, permanent pigment, oil paint: photo by Vicki Reed (holgagirl), 5 March 2013

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6 comments:

  1. ACravan16 March 2014 at 12:24

    That top photo is a wonder of nature and culture. The bottom photo complements it perfectly and the poem with its shifting directions and flow . . . well, blows me away. Jane played Tinkerbell in 5th grade. She looked terrific in the costume and appreciated not being assigned a speaking part. (I know the feeling.) This week is "Hamlet" school essay week at our house and from the sound of things around here, the rest is silence. Curtis

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  2. TC16 March 2014 at 13:07

    Curtis,

    It's a poem about having the earth pulled out from under one, though, in truth, having to do without the faery wings -- those might help for the balance.

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  3. manik sharma17 March 2014 at 00:40

    Tom,
    The 'Blown Away' theme here,much like a lot of other things involving air and flight(of sorts) has been on everyone's mind i guess..I can't remember an oddity so thick-in recent times.. ..I love "tossed cloudward" in the poem..Gives my drawing of these words a supernatural height and width..

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  4. TC17 March 2014 at 08:39

    Thanks, Manik.

    Yes, the intrinsic instability of all presumed technological certainties never appears so clearly as when a catastrophic event draws the mysterious, blinding, bewildering light of truth down from the heavens, or up from the depths of the oceans.

    The truth that the ship is on a wrong course, I mean.

    But plainly the massive accumulating catastrophe of technological civilization is a much larger theme which could not be addressed in so minimal (and indeed personal) a notation, scribbled semi-legibly on a scrap of paper in mid o'night.

    "Tossed cloudward" does perhaps encapsulate the giddy, free-floating feeling of losing the use of one's body for locomotion.

    Alas the complement to that feeling is the sense of being a dead, leaden weight upon the earth -- even less poetic, and not (yet) to be addressed in nocturnal scribblings, mercifully for the patient readership here.

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  5. Mose2319 March 2014 at 14:10

    The last two lines catch a very quiet vulnerability.

    All of us flotsam - so very small.

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  6. TC19 March 2014 at 15:28

    Yes, that was the sense of it.

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