elisabeth hewer: "the boy i love left me for a revolution" and "modern geography"

[elisabethhewer]

Hello again! First of all I apologise hugely for having been absent during the course of the week so far - all of the social duties I had seemed to deliberately drag themselves out so I had no time to post! As soon as I'm done with this post I'm going to go back and finish replying to all of your lovely comments on my first post.

So with this post, if you all don't mind, I'm going to share a couple of my poems that I put under my general sort of "love and the despair it causes" umbrella. The first is one of my oldest poems (that I dare show to the light of day!) that prompted a fairly positive reaction when I posted it on tumblr which gets borrowed every now and again to go on graphics concerning James T. Kirk (from the rebooted Star Trek mostly) and Enjolras from Les Misérables, and although I never actually intended it to be about either of those two I'm very flattered that people think it applies enough to have a creative reaction of their own to it. The second is one of my newer ones which was prompted for some very strange reason by listening to Crack the Shutters by Snow Patrol, and I couldn't tell you why exactly I'm afraid!

Anyway, I'm going to place them both under cuts, and I would really appreciate your thoughts on and reactions to either or both of them! I struggle most with flow and line breaks (I can never decide where to put them); but apart from that I would be very interested to hear what feelings you take away from them, as I'm curious to know whether the message I intended actually comes across. Thank you very much in advance for reading them!

THE BOY I LOVE LEFT ME FOR A REVOLUTION

i think you will
set yourself afire
before you realise
that even you
cannot conquer
the sun.

rebellion sits well
on you; like a red coat
or the gilt gold burnish of youth.

(i do not believe we shall ever see
how old age looks on you.

you are breaking my heart.)


MODERN GEOGRAPHY

your body is a map and i
am sat at my kitchen table
running my fingers across
its contour lines.

here the mountains
of your spine,
the desert expanse of
your stomach,
the oxbow lakes of
the gaps between your ribs.

here the cities of your eyes,
the lonely huddled villages
of your frown,
the endless ocean of your smile.

the sun comes up over
the windowsill
and you sigh, fold yourself up
away from my eager touch.

maps don't document devastation,
you see - no paths of natural disasters.
no x for the bombsite or
any battlegrounds but
the ancient romantic ones.

your battles aren't hastings or bosworth:
they're the narrow beaten alleys
of baghdad,
of kabul.

your eyes are cities
but the wreckages of them.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

May I suggest you put the poem titles in the post proper as well as in the cut tags? Having opened a new tab to read instead of expanding the cut tags, it kinda looks like one confusing untitled poem.

The first one sounds like every fantasy hero ever. I don't like the second but it's good.

[elisabethhewer]

Thank you so much for pointing that out - I've done that now! I'm very new to Dreamwidth so I'm really useless with the post formatting options.

Thank you very much for reading them! I'm sorry you didn't like the second but I am grateful that you think it's decent!

[alexseanchai]

:)

[raze]

I very much like the ideas and imagery of the second poem; the only issue I had with it was confusion about where the individuals are; the first line suggests, almost, that the individual the narrator is speaking of is sprawled out on the kitchen table much as a literal map would be, but the line about the daylight implies a more logically intimate setting to be laying on. Assuming the "kitchen table" bit was just an extension of the map metaphor, I would seek a way to make that more apparent.

I can see why the first was broadly applied to heroes in fantasy indeed. Neat that people have found it useful for characters outside of your original intention when writing it :)

[luzula]

The first one makes me want a sort of counter-poem titled "I left the boy I love for a revolution". : )

I love the body/geography images of the second poem! Favorite line: the one about the oxbow lakes of the ribs, because it's such a specific image. And I like how you go from timeless natural geographical features to modern and human ones. The scars of domestic wars...

[jjhunter]

Oh, there are some mighty fine turns of phrase here - I can see how someone might snip one up and gild it over a visual snapshot of their feels. I especially like 'rebellion sits well / on you' etc. and 'your eyes are cities / but the wreckages of them'.

I want to be seduced by the language of the second poem, but for such an explicitly visual poem the images it suggests are curiously out of focus for me. (Is the 'you' of 'your body' lying on the kitchen table? slumped in a chair? why are the expressions of sadness suggestive of human habitation but that of happiness opaque, almost unknowable / unaccessible in its endlessness?) I wonder the body being so explored is naked; there's a sense of vulnerability, self-protectiveness. (And how innocent is the one touching so eagerly even before the sun has come up past the windowsill?) This poem, like the ocean smile, gives a suggestion of depths that aren't necessary intended to be accessible to other siders.

I like the pairing of these two poems together; the former oriented toward the beloved away (for revolution, yes?), the latter toward a person who seems very much a veteran of modern war, modern battles so named.

Thank you for sharing these! I cannot help being reminded of the fragment 16 Saphho translation we'll be exploring next week - is it one you've encountered before?

[calissa]

Wow, I love that first poem! Each section has a wonderful and individual impact.

I agree that the second poem could use a little clarity regarding the setting, but I do love that second half. To me, it seems to simultaneously undermine and support the somewhat romantic bent of the first half.