Every morning I sing – the birds above
And earth below move in those dawning musings –
Those twists and turns of dream and thought, those swings
Of mood that drive us off course when we love
*
But when we think we have the lives we hoped we’d live
We sometimes see ourselves as creatures that we feared we’d be –
Monsters of imagination, whom we
Fed because of what we dreamed they’d give –
*
We travelled far through countries strange, and stranger time
Wore out our wishes, blotted all that dreaming shaped in rhyme:
Our vital hopes were blurred – still, half-asleep –
Although throughout it all our vocal passions stirred: racing deep –
*
Till one fine day (like now) we wake, we rub our eyes and then
Realise we’re singing songs of morning once again.
*
**
*
Omm
May 2018
It is an uplifting sonnet.
The words in your visuals have been intriguing me, not just in this particular poem but spread across the poems altogether. In some they are difficult to decipher.
This merges them visually but makes them more problematic to read.
I wonder if this was your intention?
Thank you Verity. Yes, the merging of the words into images is deliberate, but then again it is also an experiment perhaps not wholly successful because undecipherability is not my aim. Getting the balance right is the thing. At any rate, I am interested in merging words and images – where they overlap, where barriers arise between them. The merging is easier with shorter poems and with uplift slogans, but I tend to write poetry which doesn’t work that way. Although the haiku is one of my favourite forms, and it is famously short and allusive, in my case I have rashly experimented with it – with the haiku chain being my invention/innovation, and the form to which I am especially addicted. You will see how my chains can attach themselves to images in some of the other poems here. This poem as a sonnet would be even less apt to a successful merging with the image – the lines of sonnets being long and fourteen lines being a clump or block of words. I tried putting the poem as a whole onto the pic but didn’t love the effect, so reduced the words. Anyway, this word/visual thing is something I’ve just started looking at recently. Are you yourself pursuing this?
It is a topic I am now beginning to explore, albeit in the most initial, tentative fashion. Instagram is obviously a (or perhaps the) prime platform, and it was there, through your post of this poem, that I first discovered the link to your site. I have read a number of your poems and have been moved, impressed and indeed refreshed and have therefore sprinkled a few comments on these pages. I have not yet published any of my own poetry or verse. Like you, I am interested in seeing how word and image may merge. My thoughts on length coincide with yours, although my instinct rather than to resist the logic is to go along with the flow. Perhaps short poems and slogans are too flimsy to satisfy your desire for a freight of meaning, but I am willing to see where it will take me. May I contact you to progress a discussion about this?
I detect in your call to the muse in this sonnet strong and multiple echoes of Homer’s clarion invocation to his muse at the outset of the Odyssey.
Yes, the Odyssey has long been a touchstone for me of all sorts. Well spotted, though, James, as there is no reason you should be expected to know that, even if we have touched on the topic of Muses before and I mentioned meaning to write a piece about them a while back. The “outset of the Odyssey” is so familiar to me now that the echoes are conscious talismanic borrowings; this is an important invocation in my work, as is the connection to the O; that will become clearer as The Dark Gospel takes on its stronger public shape.
More on muses, music and musing: they’re linked themes that resound and recur in Omm’s poetry like reverberating echoes from a sounding gong, deep in the wooded, ferny valleys of experience and memory.
The topics about which the marrator/muse sings are, typically, multiple – and each is multi-faceted. At least, that’s how I’d read the opening “Every morning I sing” – which embraces the meanings of celebrating each morning (seize the day!) as of literally singing upon waking, The morning is both temporal descriptor and subject. And the merging of birds and birdsong above with the stirring of earth (and earthy early morning stirrings) below broadens the focus and takes us out into the waking world at large.
The “twists and turns of dream and thought” and the “swings/of mood that drive us off course when we love” are reminiscent of Odysseus’ idyll with Calypso, glimpsing the monsters in the paradisical-seeming life that’s captured and enraptured him, and the absence of his human, imperfect wife in the immortality he is offered.
Just so do we sometimes feel uneasy just as we seem at our happiest, and vice versa, or when we are given glimpses of a life to come, glimpses that glitter and unsettle us.