Rain in the fields

Rain in the fields

By Sean Roper

You like to tie my wrists and ankles with marionette strings,

which make me submit to your every desire.

Yet I remember yesterday planting a young oak tree

in the middle of the wheat fields, that move with the breeze;

we stop to see the sunny day turn to warm rain.

We get naked and lay down next to the tree,

So we can feel every drop hit us.

The touch of rain reaches far away

To the creek down the street; to the metal of a barn.

From our cars parked nearby; to the soft dirt of the ground.

the scent of clean warm rain and the sound of every drop remain.

A fire breaks out all around us burning us calmly.

How calming it is to feel the warmth of the flames.

This morning all that remained was the young oak tree.

I need a lot more sleep.

The Great Understanding

The Great Understanding

by Sean Roper

A mother bears down in tears of hope and rage.

A baby born from her resemblance

brings to her a new dawn of light.

She sees the final meaning of life…

The sky inflamed with the hallow of morning stars

A child sees the fallen bird, the question arises;

With the first knowledge of the cosmos,

the first understanding of life; it ends.

Reader’s Record: Poets Companion 1-19-10

pg 108 “Where is the angel for me to wrestle?
No driving snow in the glass bubble,
but mild September”

pg 112 "We're not suggesting you write badly and hope to disguise it in long lines; that can't be done."

pg 110 “ …war is not all
death it turns war is what little
thing you hold on to refugee and far from home”

Pg 109 “That is, if an end-stopped like occurs before the final like of the stanza, we still have that sense of tension, and want to read on.”

Pg 105 “There are no real rules for line breaks. Give the same paragraph of prose to five poets, and each might break it into interesting lines; but their versions probably won’t be identical”

Reader’s Record: Poets Companion 1-13-10

Reader’s Record: Poets Companion 1-13-10

Pg 22. “Poetry is an intimate act. It’s about bringing forth something that’s inside you- whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual”

This, so far, is one of my favorite definitions of poetry.

Pg25. “You don’t need to travel to exotic places or live through revolutions to write good poems…But don’t wait for something to happen before you begin to write; pay attention to the world around you, right now”

It is a very true statement that I felt was worth taking note of.

26. “I take vitamins-all the hard, football-shaped pills-sometimes they get stuck in my gullet and I panic and think what a modern way to die, they’ll come and find my dead, perfectly healthy body”

I choose this excerpt for its literary significance which convey comedy with irony. It personally appealed to me.

pg 27. “I see my therapist, my words fill up the room, the past is enormous, I steer towards anger and practice anger as if it were Italian, I throw stones at the canyon and yell and sometimes a clump of shale falls down and a spider races out”

I enjoyed the travel of visual experiences; starting from the narrators everyday perspective moving into a sort of day dream.

pg28. “As the minutes of your own life open and fall, catch them in poems. You’ve been given one life, one set of unique experiences;”

This applies not only in poetry but in meaning and indoctrination.