20090629

Barking Trees

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

You fling a round net of words and watch
impotently the better context dripping through:
the map is not the territory, and superstition
strikes the heart more forcibly than facts.
Grasping meaning, promptly discard words
like the hollow yellow shells of seven-year
cicadas clinging to the bark of transitory trees
they are. Men burn up their bodies and minds
at work, oblivious to a salary's negligible worth.

2 comments:

  1. Cicadas clinging to transitory trees, ah how poetic a device to use.

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  2. you know, if you attend a lecture, say, and hear some very technical new thing explained, then your mind is striving to wrap itself around this new thing, and then you leave and meet some friend, and tell her of this new idea, only in entirely new words of your own choosing. these things words sometimes make a writer feel powerful, but they are nothing; it's the stuff sieved through that counts, and you can't squeeze that into a fountain pen.

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