Grex Poetry Conference

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Grex Poetry Item 297: Harvest Song
Entered by morwen on Tue Feb 12 18:09:29 UTC 2002:

Is that you?
Is it you that has been fighting me
All this time?
Your father and I planted the seed
That made you
And I watched as day by day
The stretch-marks grew,
Like some reddish tumbleweed,
While, inside, 
The fruit of the plant,
                       You,
                           Took shape.
Soon that green fruit will be ripe and red
And you my tiny warrior
Will kick and claw your way
Into the bright, cold, unfamiliar world
Armed, it seems to me,
As Athena was.

I only hope
I am ready to receive you.
~12 February, 2002

7 responses total.

#1 of 7 by arianna on Sat Feb 16 00:56:54 2002:

"like some reddish tumbleweed" -- very very good.

#2 of 7 by morwen on Tue Feb 19 11:02:51 2002:

Thanks.  I'm not entirely sure that this is my best work, but I'm a 
tad out of practice and was only jolted into writing since the 
pregnancy is comeing to an end.

#3 of 7 by jazz on Fri Feb 22 04:52:01 2002:

        One comment;  you're mixing two or three metaphors here;  first a
plant, then a soldier, and then, at least for me, Pallas Athena's birth.  Is
that intentional?

#4 of 7 by jaklumen on Sun Feb 24 00:40:57 2002:

you don't have the real life context.  The first metaphor is typical 
imagery for birth; in the second, she's referring to how the baby 
moves and kicks.. hard.  the third, I'm not sure.

imagery make a little more sense now?

#5 of 7 by morwen on Sun Feb 24 04:07:02 2002:

Well, for the third I was reaching into the future a little.  Seems to 
me that birth pains must be a lot like that raging headache that Zeus 
supposedly had when he (yes "he") gave birth to Athena.  So I imagine 
my child as fighting his/her way into the world like Athena did (only 
Athena's birth wasn't nearly as messy as the birth of *this* child is 
likely to be).

I didn't think of mixing metaphors, really.  I was just attempting to 
express my feelings with the images that came to mind at the time.  I 
know it's considered sorta gauche in peotry to refer to more than one 
image in a single poem, but <shrug> it fit, so I wrote it down.

#6 of 7 by jazz on Sun Feb 24 18:28:39 2002:

        It's not that it's "gauche" to mix metaphors, it's that it makes for
some very unusual reading.  A poem that may take hours to write and may
consist of sorting out hundreds of viable metaphors in the head of the author
may take only seconds to read, and changing metaphors rapidly can produce
confusion and contradiction.  At best it's a tricky, and risky, tecnique.

#7 of 7 by morwen on Wed Feb 27 01:44:00 2002:

Oh.  Well.  I don't generally write that way.  I usually let a few 
pitures rattle around in my brain for a few days then, one day, I try 
to put it all down on paper.

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