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oracle-of-nonsense — Tired
Published: 2013-03-08 01:08:12 +0000 UTC; Views: 286; Favourites: 7; Downloads: 1
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Description
Your car sits in the sand and starved grassof your mother’s front lawn,
its roar of high school machismo quieted.
It is just another thing you have pushed
to the edge of brokenness,
lacking the mercy to end it
or the will to fix it.
Eventually, it will give out entirely
and someone will come to tow it away,
because that’s just
easiest.
Remembering your careless step,
the toothy smile that said
you had already forgotten it,
I can only imagine
that God is a sad old man
with a receding line of wispy hair
and watery bloodshot eyes
too weary for bitterness --
He did not see this future
when He created us and said
that we were very good.
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Comments: 9
Love it. Very poignant. Based on your replies to whitefox00, what I thought was going on when I read the poem seems to be more or less right, though I was thinking maybe they'd had a fight or he'd done something thoughtless and then brushed it off, not just a general, incident-free trend of neglect. "the toothy smile that said / you had already forgotten it" made me think he had done something that he figured it would be easy to just forget about and brush off and not "make a big deal" over.
I adore the last three lines. Well, I adore the whole thing, from the car and the lawn (oh the lawn that hints at a whole life and socioeconomic status and place) right through to the end, but I think it ends it beautifully, bringing it from one concrete situation to something that can be generalized to the human condition. I think that here you transition from the specific imagery and situation to the general and er... ideological, I guess?... very smoothly. My sense of why God is weary is that humans can be very apathetic and cruel through carelessness and laziness rather than active evil. If it were active evil, he could be angry, filled with the energy of wrath, but the apathy just brings a weary disappointment. Is that kind of what you were going for?
I also like your guidelines for critique. Do you teach English lit?
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Excellent. I'm glad you understood the poem. It is and it isn't, because in addition to general neglect of the speaker, he also just gives up, forgets, and moves on, without ever really trying to fix things or feeling any particular emotional loss.
I have to admit, those were actually most of the lines that started the poem. The lawn is particularly useful, I will admit. That was really exactly it, he won't be angry and rage, just sort of watch with sadness the apathy of his creations. Thank you for your comments
Hmm, thank you. No, I do not, I'm just a lowly English major/creative writing minor at the moment, and will probably never teach.
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You're welcome. I'm glad they were useful.
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I've never been good at interpreting poetry but I really like this part:
I can only imagine
that God is a sad old man
with a receding line of wispy hair
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I'm glad you like it
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You might have to explain this one to me. All I'm getting is a sense of loss, wondering what could have been. Also that God might be sad because of something the first person mentioned did. The narrator may also be implicated in this, because of the collective us/we in 'when He created us and said/we were very good.' I'm not sure, though, because there's not many other ways to say that, except maybe 'when He created humans' or something else. I'm puzzled by 'the toothy smile that said/you had already forgotten it', to what that refers. And for some reason (probably 'machismo'), I think of a purple muscle car/smallish monster truck with flames on it.
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It's more a feeling of hurt, because the relationship is another thing that has been pushed to the edge of brokenness, something that the 'he' did not care enough about to fix. It was supposed to mean we as in mankind, humanity, and it was kind of playing on the original man and woman that God pronounced to be "very good." It is referring to the car, but the narrator also feels like she would be easily forgotten and given up if the relationship became too much trouble. Well, it was really just a reddish-purple Saturn with a pipe on it, but what you imagine works.
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Yah, I really didn't catch the relationship bit. I was thinking more of looking at an old friend who didn't live up to his potential and was just subsisting. I understood the thing about God, but the heavy tone made me think the narrator felt bad too. Maybe not at fault, but not living up to being 'very good', or their life not living up to that. If I had had a hint (or a stronger hint, if I missed it) about the relationship between the two, I think I would have understood about it being pushed to the edge. That's rather sad to think about. :/
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I mean, it could be that, I suppose, but it was supposed to be a romantic relationship. The narrator does feel a little bad, but more sad, feeling like she's not important and just as easily left behind. It is sad to think about.
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