9:21 PM Posted by James Owens

(Oddly ambivalent. Maybe it's not a very good poem.)

A poem in Tipton Poetry Journal

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3 comments:

Roxana said...

it's very beautiful. old monks weeping and longing for becoming...
thank you so much for what you told me yesterday. it _does_ matter, doesn't it? and your poems help to live in beauty. and maybe this takes away the fear a little bit, the fear of becoming. we are not monks, not all of us, very few maybe...

C. E. Chaffin said...

A little gimmicky, but the monks wishing to be pure flame, neither ash nor mud, speaks to the spiritual ambition of man, despite the worldly act of lighting a smoke. A lot in a few lines. But I don't know if the lighter works with the monks, exactly; maybe therein lies a bit of your ambivalence.

CE

sam of the ten thousand things said...

I really like the imagery in the second stanza. Although, I don't visualize a lighter. I see a match with the cupped hands. I notice also the presence of a walker (or at least one who stands) - moving through the world without the machine of the speaker. A similar separation is realized in "Encounter". Good piece, James.