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RE: A bloom serene

in #poetry6 years ago (edited)

Greetings, @d-pend.
You seem to accentuate in this piece one particular aspect of your word play: word order. When English is not our second language and we struggle for decades to get adj before nouns right, it is curious how discommodious it can get to run into a different pattern.
Of course, poetry has always allowed for such licenses, but still...
All these "delayed" adjectives give every verse a sense of elongation, like an afterthought that is not quite.
And this was just me rambling about what I perceived as a linguistic oddity that may not be.
As for the poem itself, I see an enphasis on introspection. The rose is not quite a rose, contravening what Stein would say :)

The serenity may be inspired by the physical external floral phenomenon, but it is experienced internally.
It is "self-seeded", nobody planted that rose inside us. How does it bloom, though?
Maybe out of contemplation; the understanding that flowers languish. The image of floor carpeted with orange cayenas (my mother's favorite flower, by the way. She calls them Cachupinas) is suggestive of decay; magnified by the sound of crashing chandeliers.
I am not quite sure what the "mental mane" means here but it is a mangled one; it suggests artificiality, and nobody will solve that for you. That mane has to be "self-shorn", only then can lucidity comes back.
I like the image of the "gnatacious cloud" obscuring the mind. It echoes one of the biblical plagues.
And it is precisely the scent of this inner rose that will clear the air of this pestilence.
Then, we can talk about inner peace, something quite hard to achieve for some of us.

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This was an excellent read. As you recognized, the rose is a metaphor for that finer part of ourselves, which, when nurtured, recontextualizes the seeming chaos of the outer world (and the inner life, as well.)

Regarding the changing of word order, I fear I am quite guilty of such poetic license. In fact, if I couldn't break ordinary grammatical structures, I would not find poetry so delightful to write. I can definitely empathize with the oddness of interfacing with poetry in a second language. I quite love Borges and Octavio Paz, but glean much more from translations due to my somewhat mediocre Spanish.

There is turmoil in this piece, some looming lack of comprehension of life's vicissitudes. Only the continued revelation of life's ordinary wonders can cause the motion to become harmonious to an ever-subtler faculty of perception.

I appreciate your taking some time to comment on my comment.
Glad to know you enjoy some Latinamerican writers (even if it is through translations; as Borges himself would say it about some of his translated works, sometimes they are improved by the translation).
I certainly saw that turmoil; I am going through one at the moment. I am finding it very hard to reconcile expectations with reality, my sense of logic, reason and justice with life's vicissitudes.
I know i need some inner and outer explorations to re-discover life's wonders and find harmony, but i am finding it harder every day.
I am very thankful to you for having providing me with chances to pause and think; I am finding it very hard to concentrate on intellectual work. Somehow, as reality crushes you, art appears as a poor and deceiving immitation of reality; one that only postpones the inevitable collision.
Yet, again, thanks for the opportunity to delay that collision.

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