Because we all want to write more poems.
Memory
We chase the dead with words
Scribbled on blank spaces
In journals letters and cards
Spoken to relatives
Otherwise only known
Through holiday updates
Amnesia soon sets in
Among memories
As once clear events fade
There is no one to talk to
There is no one to listen
Photographs with forgotten names
In a carved wooden box
Once precious contents
For sale in a second hand shop
- Clayton Medeiros's Shared Poems
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Comments
Benjamin Gorman
March 10, 2012
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Chasing the dead
with words. Great image. Puts me in mind of purposes of language-- merely to hold onto things in a world of constant change? There's a pome in there somewhere.
Clayton Medeiros
March 10, 2012
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Yes. The words can end up
Yes. The words can end up replacing and becoming a reality. They can redraw memory. Language creates its own meanings that work to the extent that we chose to share meaning. Milan Kundera talks about the greatest danger to our common humanity is the amnesia of history. I just finished reading Borges The Aleph short stories and he is a master of the transformations that words and language can make.
In a Borges story called The Immortal, the main character says, "As the end approaches, there are no longer images from memory--there are only words."