the house martins darted
past my window
stuck mud pellets
from the rosegarden
under the gable
dived in arcs
snapped insects
on the wing
the nest
precarious
clung to the wall
sunbaked
every year it fell
a shattered crock
from the potters' wheel
hatchlings barely formed
skulls crushed
blueberry skineyes huge
scattered on the concrete
claws grasping.
A contest entry
- Keeping Things Whole by AJ Morelli.
3500 points, ended April 2, 24 entries
Gold trophy winner
• next poem in this contest, remove from contest
What did you think
Comments
1 - 19 of 19
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oh my god. BLIP=(my term for awesomeness)
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I knew this was gold the first time I read it..
there's such a sense of transience in it.. desperation and everything that suggests endings...and yet at the same time it's expected. what is, the way things are if you look at the whole picture..
congratulations
sorry I'm late.
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Hi Liza- thanks- it seems a lifetime away that I wrote this, and had all but forgotten about it. Ironically I had been thinking back to that house again today.
Hoping all is well with you.
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I read a lot into this
We have a lot of barn swallows here, with nests in (and on) the barn, the sheds, the house, so the metaphor rings with a personal tone. I saw the nests, the babies skulls, from the eyes of a child, half-formed and just as vulnerable in a world full of hard surfaces and events, seemingly engineered to make it difficult to form to adulthood.
When there is a storm or big wind, the sight of those tiny victims tear at the aware heart with the same impact as reading the daily paper with news of the wars, famines, the warming and ever more poisonious air.
I knew the winners of this contest would be special, and I was right. This is a decptively simple poem, but with volumes between the lines, room for the psyce of the reader to imprint our own images on a scene of vulnerability and youth. Also, a very good answer to those who insist that punctuation must be used to guide the reader.
Congrats on a well deserved award.
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Thanks Rob- yes- that is it exactly. The victims elicit compassion even though they are so alien which is a reality and a metaphor to carry forward when those bigger poisonous things in the world seem detached from ones own life.
I do know how punctuate, more or less, but I found when using the medium of poem it can restrict the reader into only seeing a phrase or juxtaposition of words in one way, while by choosing the juxtaposition of words around a line break can give the reader the choice of where to make the break of the thought himself, and thus make his own interpretation that suits him from a number of possibles, and the poet can say multiple things in the one phrase. I like to try to explore this.
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Once, I even looked down at the latest victim and wished it could have "phoned home." They do look just like we imagine aliens.
Funny thing, when we are young fetuses, we do too.
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I agree...
Congrats!
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an excellent poem and a very strong entry in the contest...
very nice work
al
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baby robins. for me it was baby robins --- those damn beautiful sky blue eggs and the horrifying half done contents
or those that either been pushed out by their mother or wind-tossed.
this deadness was the first i encountered as a child mucking about the yard and it caused me to think more than a little kid should probably have thought at such a young age.
good poem. been reading it for days.
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This is so touching. Creatures never cease to amaze me, their industry. Last year I needed to remove an ants' nest, built up into a largish mound. I hated destroying it but you know what? They just rolled their sleeves up and built another one. I am having to learn to work around them now and i wish I had thought of that then.
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can I just say that it made me sad?
it's good..
I don't envy al having to judge this contests.
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I adored the story within the story here....
Had these birds on my farm and can picture this perfectly... we had cow birds too... they were horrible things - moving into others nests and kicking out the eggs
I dont know why i resent the cowbird so much- its just how the cycle of life goes.
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this isn't just about birds right!!! but about the way life comes, changes and becomes seasoned with ages of wing and death that inevitable bite..
have i told you, how good you are... yes!!!
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The story is true, but I was fotunate that my father had a marvellous sense of metaphor, and he would make up a story as an allegory to tell me when I was upset that the baby birds had died again, and that amazingly crafted construction , all that time work the martins had done just for nothing. They did always start to build another one, but now I realise it was just as a roost until they flew south. They never until that last year raised a brood. Mind you, they were messy builders.
Thanks , as always Gilly.
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We don't have house martin's here, but this gives me a feeling of such a brief period of 'to be' and the inevitability that all things fall. Such an intangible feeling of wanting to live yet finding the difficulty in doing so because of outside influences we cannot know or see. C
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We don't have so many here any more. They used to come every year when I was a child, and the first time the nest stayed up and they reared the brood was my last summer at home.
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The constant struggle to exist for them I guess spills over the difference is that human's tend to give up but I bet they kept on rebuilding it each time it fell C
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wow
This is a pretty awsome piece of work. Wonderful flow of words. It was a very interesting poem. And it was a pleasure to read.
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Thank you very much
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