BEWARE!!!Mercury Retrograde: Astrology on the Web

Mercury Retrograde: Astrology on the Web

OH MAN! That really explains a lot about the situations in my life right now!

Lost Survivor « Mother2rah’s Weblog

Lost Survivor « Mother2rah’s Weblog

I always take it as a sign of talent when an author, or any artist for that matter, creates something that moves others to expressions in their own medium. Siobhan (Mother2rah) was moved to write this sonnet after her first reading of Tom Jones’ book LOST SURVIVOR.

Two very talented writers and honorable persons.

Sonnet for my absent son

Song of My Son: Song of My Self

Paternal as I long to be—distance

Erodes memory. How long since I held,

Desperate, clinging infant you? Beheld

Alive your eyes, my eyes. Our insistence,

Not from love’s lack, but in the persistence

That hope demands for better . . . Could love weld

Hearts together? No. Neither could love meld

Alive our strange insanities—penance

Left us only one choice: your adoption,

For your mother and I were oil and flame—

But either no fault the other should claim

Lest karma strike fatal conflagration!

Utter love and contempt as fire we shared

Despite paradox wishes—We ran scared.

                  David M Pitchford
                  19 October 2007

I wrote this just now as part of a sequence that goes with my fourth novel. The sonnets obscure clues the characters are desperate to solve, as it is the only way to retrieve the paternal character from a magic mirror. One of the characters is based on a son I and his mother gave up for adoption some years ago. Sometimes poetry can help us work through tough spots, even if their encysted memories that catch in throats with cat claws and rend our hearts until tears flow from sources deeper than life . . .

Lost Survivor by Thomas R. Jones

Independent Publishers Group

This is a really terrific book. Unfortunately, it’s not getting near as much attention as it deserves. Tom is a wonderful story teller, and this story is one with a great deal of pertinent reality to it. The protagonist is a young man who goes to Vietnam to serve his tour. He lasts long enough to come home, but comes home to find that everything has changed. To survive in Nam, he had to unlearn what he’d learned as survival in the safety of the Midwest. Now, returning home, he has to unlearn combat survival and relearn what survival means back in central Illinois. Powerful! Buy it. Read it. Tell everyone you know about it.

National Novel Writing Month

National Novel Writing Month

I’m in to win!

Of a naked lady: Sonnet 041007

Andromeda, on the Rocks

What were you thinking at that moment? Here
you were waiting for the whale—like Jonah,
only without hope of rescue, not a
chance of redemption. Wind, waves drawing near
with threats to swallow—did you clench in fear
against those bonds? Or in crisis own a
fragment of yourself in courage? Born of
a mother too prideful, did you shed a tear?

And now a mother of six! Did you tell
your children of their father’s valiant grace,
his flight on Pegasus, his baser, fell
tactics against your fiancé? Some trace
remains in tales and stars, in each seashell
echoes your struggle; nothing can erase.

                     David M Pitchford 041007

This marks me as a bit of a Neoclassicist—or at least a poet with characteristics of such. I think my entire artistic self began with myth. It started with the Bible (not as myth), and then kicked in with Ms. Brenda reading the Tales of Ulysses for us in second grade. I’ve since read a great deal of mythology (and created a bit of my own). Enjoy the poem. Please comment if so moved. I’ve actually coined a term for the poetic work I’m doing here as: zenoneoclassicism (and new and slightly different take on the classics in that I am at the heart of me a Romantic, and yet have the rational love of reason and order the classics evoke and uphold).

The Painting is Edward Poynter’s 1869 version of Andromeda chained for the Kraken

Poynter’s Andromeda
Dore’s Andromeda
Chasseriau’s Andromeda

Life On The Periphery

Life On The Periphery

Hm-mm. This is interesting . . .

Mother2rah’s Weblog

Mother2rah’s Weblog

My poet wife has joined us on this wondrous plane of Ether . . . Poetry is how we met – and oh what poetry it has been!