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MM
Marie Marshall
Apr 10, 2011 ⭐ View statistics (Premium feature)

A young woman who loved me spoke Welsh to me

A young woman who loved me spoke Welsh to me;
perhaps she was lying in her own language, but her kisses felt like truth.
She held me as though I was the brightest pebble from the river,
hard in her hand, close to her breast; she did not let me go,
I fell by my own mass, by my own gravity, not back into the river
but onto the dry, yellow ground where all I owned was
the little half-pit I made in the dust, and that wasn't really mine.
No more Welsh, no river-ripple, just deep-dull, lost, closing,
heartbeatless, truthless, sleep.

About This Poem

Last Few Words: I have posted this poem firstly to test the system. I wrote it this morning. It is based on a dream I had last night and on the emotions I felt during the dream and when I had woken up (and fallen asleep again!). As with all my poetry this year it was originally typeset in (Eric Gill's) Perpetua 14pt. Re-posted in plain text on the evening of 10th April, typed straight in - that seems to have done the trick. NB If anyone find this hard to read, please let me know and I will email you an MS Word file in larger font.

Style/Type: Free verse

Review Request Direction: [This option has been removed]

Editing Stage: Not actively editing

About the Author

Region, Country: by Dundee, Scotland, GBR

Favorite Poets: I try not to be influenced; I like the work of Chez Harvey and Lane A Smith, I admire Richard Siken but don't often like his work. I admire Lisa Jarnot. I can take Carol Ann Duffy and Liz Lochhead in small doses. I am in awe of Shakespeare, Yeats, and Dylan Thomas. I think Robert Browning and Philip Larkin should have been strangled at birth.

More from this author

Comments

Roscoe Lane

Roscoe Lane

14 years 3 months ago

To be able,

To be able to express a dream so well in a poem is an art, and i believe you have captured this. I love that last line, heartbeatless, truthless sleep. Welcome to neopoet, hope to read a lot more of your work. Regards Roscoe..

M

Marie Marshall

14 years 3 months ago

Thanks, Roscoe.

Hi Roscoe, thanks. Any ideas how to get this to appear on screen with my deliberately long lines intact and unspaced?

M

Marie Marshall

14 years 3 months ago

Thanks, Xena.

Thanks for your comments. As it happens the current style in which I write is free verse but with long lines; I find this is a way of adding strength to free verse, it shows confidence, and allows me to use both punctuation and line breaks to control the rhythm and flow of the reading. I can see that the system simply won't accommodate that, so maybe I will have to find another way of presenting my poetry. Perhaps blogging it - that's a thought. Perhaps I will look at that possibility, then people will have a chance of seeing the poem as I intended it.

M

P

pleiades

14 years 3 months ago

marie, to add to warrior

marie, to add to warrior princess's helpful
comment, in case you're unaware ...go to
"tools", and select "submit content" to
chose blog or forum

don't have time to crit this write at the moment
will return

cheers
p

M

Marie Marshall

14 years 3 months ago

Thanks, P

I'll give that a go, thanks. I'll see if I can blog the same poem.

M

Race_9togo

Race_9togo

14 years 3 months ago

Hello Marie

Welcome to Neopoet.

Please excuse the occassionally chaotic navigation and functions on our site. We are in the process of readying Neopoet for a public re-launch, and things are a little hectic.

As a member, your voice and opinions about our site is important, so please feel free to tell us what is wrong and what is right, what you like and dislike about our site ('our' includes you, heehee).

I find the format of your poem just fine, it reads very clearly. Usually, when there are formatting issues, it is best to copy and paste your poem from your editor into notebook, then reformat there as needed before posting on Neopoet.

I smiled at your "Please do not critique mechanics", etc. for in fact it needs no changes in those terms. This reads very much like prose poetry to me, and I like it very much; it is evocative, and holds a dream-like quality that I enjoy (a thing I felt before I read your Last Few Words).
I hope you find Neopoet to be a good new home. Feel free to ask any member for help in getting around; if they don't know the answer, they can point you to someone who will.

M

Marie Marshall

14 years 3 months ago

Hi Jim

Hi Jim, and thanks for the comments.

Formatting - that's because I deleted the whole poem (in the state it was in) and re-typed it straight into Neopoet, using 'plain text'. It appears that is the only way I can get the system to accept my long lines.

I just clicked 'please don't critique mechanics' originally because it would have been pointless anyone saying they did or did not like the layout, because the layout was decided by the system, not my me!

'Prose poetry' - that's not really my intention. Lately I have simply been writing free verse with long lines. I do this to show confidence in the strength of my poetry, and to allow both internal punctuation and line length to indicate pace, pause, and breathing to the reader.

Copying from editor to notebook. I am not entirely sure what you mean by this. I compose my poetry in MS Word. Oh and by the way, I use italics a lot in my poems; I am currently holding back some poetry from here because I am not confident that I can force the system to accept both long lines AND italics in the same go.

Here's some feedback. What would make things good from my point of view would be if the system would allow one to enter blank lines before and after the body of text of a poem, thereby allowing it to sit in a bigger space. This seems to be no problem on 'another site' (no names) where you might have read my poetry before.

Lately I have also been creating Lithopoemai (see http://lithopoesis.webs.com to get an idea; my normal format, unlike on the web site, is black font on white paper); this form really require a system whereby one can form narrow columns of fully justified text. I doubt if that facility will ever be available here. What do you think?

M

Marie Marshall

14 years 3 months ago

Thanks, Ian.

Thanks Ian. I had thought of that, but then again I didn't compose a poem preceded by a line of vertical dots!

Race_9togo

Race_9togo

14 years 3 months ago

Hi Marie,

Sorry it took so long to respond.

 Notepad (not notebook, sorry) is the basic text editor provided with Windows.

By copying and pasting from Word into Notepad, all word-specific formatting is discarded, and after some reformatting in notepad, the result can then be copied and pasted into Neopoet, and will pretty much be stored as you copied it.

It looks like Andrew is working on formatting translation that will allow direct copying from Word, though!

 

M

Marie Marshall

14 years 3 months ago

Notepad

On reflection, I was guessing to myself that's what you might have meant.

CCfire

CCfire

14 years 3 months ago

lol

Was that a gush I heard? Glad my recommendation has been successful

M

Marie Marshall

14 years 3 months ago

Street cred

Well I for one lost that when I started wearing sandals. Don't worry about it.

4

49reasons

14 years 3 months ago

Marie

this just "fits"
it has a feel of the closure in sleep
enjoyed the read

M

Marie Marshall

14 years 3 months ago

Fits

Thanks. :-)

Just re-reading, I'm wondering whether I haven't got the transition from line 6 to line 7 wrong.

M

Marie Marshall

14 years 3 months ago

Okay...

... ta both. It's just that that transition is the only one that cuts so hard into the middle of a grammatical construction. What would you both say to my shifting the single word 'was' down a line? Would that be better?

CCfire

CCfire

14 years 3 months ago

leave the was...

I read it straight onto the next line so I don't think it causes any pause, I tried dropping it down and the pause comes in the wrong spot that way.

D

Dalton

14 years 3 months ago

ThanQ for sharing Marie

A nice story-poem, excellent use of language. And imagry that involved the thinking mind as well as the feeling heart.

John