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Unlight
Unlight
Jan 05, 2009 ⭐ View statistics (Premium feature)

The ward of the unknown

I wandered for eternities
Through rooms haunted by thoughts...
I only chose a pair of words
To write with them on my heart,
I stamped it with my bitter ink,
Slowly pressing my name on it
Alongside, there's her name,
To separate her charms
From the curse of uncertainty.

Time's medley floated upon our bodies,
But today it's all around, it's closing in our souls
It's swallowed by the black hole of the minds,
Sweeping the ground of every floor.
The Earth grew sick
From all the hearts he gathered
For these thousands of years
With the salt, the pepper,
The spleen that rest in them
Beyond what we know as life.

The worm of sin,
As the lights go off,
Sinks in our blanket of bones.
It feasts on the flesh we left behind,
For he's done harvesting on our soul
As we sleep.
It grows wings, leaving the ruins behind
To guide another unaware creature,
Youthful and hopeful,
In what is called
The ward of the unknown.
— Unlight, Jan 05, 2009

About This Poem

About the Author

Country/Region: Romania

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Critiques

ID

Ink Dragon

17 years 5 months ago

As it happens

I found the change of the pronoun a little disruptive. I can´t help feeling this would read even better if all of it was in 3rd person singular. Please think it over, ~N
Unlight

Unlight

17 years 5 months ago

Nina, I will think about

Nina, I will think about what you said, but it will remain as it is, until I'll find a better way to express it. Cheers!
Y

youarehere

17 years 5 months ago

Hello, Unlight...

You write with a consistent dark-night-of-the-soul message and quality, yet with an obscured illumination at the end of the tunnel. Your poems...dense forests of words and imagery...like the forests encountered by Dante's traveller at the beginning of the his journey, and Dante's traveller wearing a leather jacket. Passion for the gut. Defiance in the face of impossibility. This poem...no one gets out of ehre alive! that's such atruth, and your poem has such a different perspective than my natural perspective...but your darkness makes the winged worm-soul at the end such a tragic hero as it heads back to guide another inert vessel through the world and their life. The word "hence" tripped me up. Maybe the poem works without it, or maybe it can be "henceforth." Dunno. I was also struck by the pronoun change, as Ink mentioned, although it didn't bother as much as pitch me out of the poem between the first and second stanzas. I took the liberty of replacing pronouns in the first stanza just to see what it felt like. You, of course, will do as you feel, and as your poem compels. He wandered for eternities Through rooms haunted by thoughts… He only chose a pair of words To write with them on his hearts, He stamped it with his bitter ink, Slowly pressing his name on it Alongside, there’s her name, To separate her charms From the curse of uncertainty. Thank you for the passionate and haunting poems, beautifully written, of your journey. -Michael
Unlight

Unlight

17 years 5 months ago

Youarehere

First I want to thank you for reading my work and for your kind words. I thought about changing something, but I can't, since, you see, this poem is made of two grounds: the first ground represents the ground of the inner man who reveals his fears to the reader (first stanza), and the second ground is potentiated by the fears themselves, the flow of the time into nothingness - the ground of the time (stanzas 2 and 3). I hope you will find a way to pass over the pronoun change, because it's a very important aspect, if not crucial, of this poem. Cheers!
Y

youarehere

17 years 5 months ago

Unlight

You removed the "hence." I like the result. When I read the poem with the context you just offered it works powerfully and beautifully and I'm not pitched out of the flow between stanza 1 to stanza 2 due the pronoun switch. I really appreciate you offeirng a context for your poem. One of my favorite aspects of being here, or connecitng with any artists anywhere about art, is the sense of dialogue, the back and forth exchange, whether it's about mechanics, meaning or experience of a piece of art. I do feel and believe that art works stand on their own without engagement or interpretation for those that are not artists, but I also believe that, as artists, we challenege and inspire eachother. I believe art and art-making are essentially communal instincts in humankind (as we can see from the earliest prehistoric art). Perhaps art wakes people up, but artists wake eachother up, and even without exchanged words, our art pieces become a communal dialogue between us all. Prehisitoriclly speaking, the artist and the shaman were one and the same. Thank you for the dialogue. -Michael