Submitted by Kim Whysall-Hammond
Poetry is the orphan of silence
Begging for attention
Word spaces and line breaks
Her crutches
Whatever the poem describes to you
Is a shadow
A portion, a flavour
Of what the poet is trying to say
Photo credit: Leonardo da Vinci – Sketches
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This is beautiful!
Love it. The orphan of silence and perhaps the voice above the noise!
Agreed! We’re glad you stopped by our site–we’ve enjoyed your poetry for the last few weeks.
I love this, especially the first stanza.
The opening lines are very powerful; I’d never have thought of poetry ‘as the orphan of silence’, but it works really well.
Stunning in its simplicity. I love it.
Good point in the second stanza that what the poem describes is a shadow of what the poet was trying to say.
This is an excellent poem. The first line is irresistible and the last line leaves me wondering. It leads me to think about the role of the poet/artist. Are we the interpreters of the shadows or do we just throw our own shadows on the wall?
What a fascinating and thoughtful response! You pose an excellent question–it’s our belief that posing such questions was quite the “purpose” of this piece, if it can be said to have one, due to its meta-poetic style that seems to comments on the process of poetry itself.
I think we are making our best effort, when we are at our best, to interpret the shadows we see, unfortunately we have to use our own shadow puppets to get at the meaning of what we see. So it is shadow upon shadow upon shadow…
Thank you all for your comments on my poem. I am intrigued by what we try to achieve when we write poetry and have written several poems exploring this. ‘Orphan’ is the latest one and was sparked by the quote from Charles Simic:
“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.”
This is true in many cases! Love the way this flows.
Dwight
Reading between those blue lines we all have a different perspective which makes the written so interesting.