Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Elusive Essence

It is hard to get to the essence of things, so the poem below is me just trying to find out what the important part of the story is. I stumbled across familiar words recently, Prayer concerns "For the family of..." a man I knew, whose life lately had unraveled, but I didn't know he had died. He told me a story once. When he was four he and his mother watched his father take off in a private plane. It was a birthday present for his dad. The plane went up and then fell before their eyes in flames. I think his father's burning ashes seared all his days. I haven't got it right yet, but that's the story, at any rate.

2 comments:

Talia Reed said...

Perhaps you could try making lists of words. Start with words describing this man or his family. (focus on verbs and nouns rather than adjectives or adverbs). Then make a list of words dealing with airplanes or aviation. Then try to pull out the words that sound the best, that paint the best picture.

I always end up skimming, skimming, skimming down; eliminating everything that isn't absolutely necessary (that's what I try to do).

Charmi said...

This is good advice, but probably what I need most is time to let the images do what they want inside my brain. I am a very slower processor. I store things away for eons and let them float around. Then suddenly, they all come together like some sort of comet.