Post by Wolf on Feb 22, 2004 2:25:37 GMT -5
Burial
Wandering alone in the night
through desolate worlds of stinging sand
and howling winds,
seeking, searching for lost dreams...
Stars stare down mocking and cold,
gibbous moon a vast malignant orb laughing
in ebon sky as I grope amongst sand dunes,
feeling my dreams and hopes sift
through my fingers as the sterile sand...
Crying out defiance and rage,
I stumble on, even as the storm thickens
and closes in--vision dims, then fails,
and the shifting, swirling sands enclose me,
just as time enclosed and buried my dreams...
Darkness swallows me even as I scream
my rage to the merciless winds,
and I am cast adrift in limbo...
© T. GhostWolf Davidson, February 11, 1974
Footnote:
Smiling softly - a poet here whom is very dear to my heart knows this one... it's very allegorical - and, looking back at it from 30 years later (20/20 hindsight and all that), the poem is very prophetic as well - "cast adrift in limbo" indeed...
Burial was written a little less than three months after April (my ex-wife and mother of our son) and I were married... I had gotten home from work, and could tell she was unhappy about something - so I asked.
She said "I married you just to get away from my mother, and wish I hadn't." The resulting conversation - if it could be called that - was devastating, to put it mildly.
She left aftterwards to spend the night at her sister's house; I went for a long walk (this was about 2 AM) - it was a very cold, clear night. When I got back, I wrote "Burial".
In the first stanza, all of my (now-shattered) hopes and dreams about my relationship with April are the sharp pieces of sand, and the howling winds the cold, numbing realization that everything I thought I had with her was based on deception - most of the deception on her part, but some on my part as well - I'd seen the warning signs, the red flags, but ignored them and attributed her mood swings and (rather nasty jibes) to her reaction to her very abusive mother.
In the second stanza, I'm reflecting part of the reality of that night; there was a full moon that night - and it really felt to me like it was mocking me - full moons are supposed to be romantic, and that night certainly wasn't... The sand dunes are a further expansion of how I saw all my hopes and drearms; shattered and ground down into ever-so-many particles of drifting sand, which I kept sifting through, trying to find the now-lost hopes to no avail.
The third stanza reflects my anger at the betrayal, and my own refusal to accept the truth of the reality of what April's and my relationship was really like - and my inability to accept that, with the resultant rejection and denial of that reality... and the overwhelming truth of that reality burying my mind and soul in the same ways that life had buried my childhood dreams of a safe home, of safe parents... blinding me to everything except the pain and betrayal...
The final stanza is a description of the mental, emotional, and spiritual darkness that descended as a result, my denail, and how that denial resulted in a limbo, a state of being where - because I refused to accept the reality - I was then trapped in that reality...
Trapped, it turned out, for 20 years, because it was a reality I would not accept; a reality I denied - a reality I thought I could change...
The river denial is very deep.
Wolf
