By Sawyer Lyons
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Calliope, my Love,
Where have you gone?
We rode together through the moonlit highway,
A convertible, cold wind through our hair,
I saw the candles of romance burn in your eyes.
We listened to my albums of admiration on the ride,
The Beatles and the Backstreet Boys,
My fantasies of words I want to bring,
Serenades, poetry, and heartbreak things,
While you watched my mouth, head resting on your soft hands.
You watched me with such unwavering smiles,
As we sat eating dinner, talking of life and its values,
Eating slivers of finely seared steak,
Sipping white wine while blushing pink
A candle between our ceramics, a pulsing heart in the room of dark.
I felt my world vomit from my chest,
Every emotion, every love, distress, hope, and gift,
And paint the table with rainbow love and color smears
Which you watched with eager eyes, studying as it appeared.
Where did the night go, Muse?
I left you a voicemail on the wire,
Telling you to grab the lyre and lyrics
Because after all that time spent spewing and craving
The gift of words that I thought you’d let me live with
I took you home to your colonnade mansion,
Overlooking gardens of fruit and rows of hedges,
Where you smiled and disappeared inside,
Behind Ionian pillars of marbled might,
With your red silk train flowing behind,
Like a bloody river of ruby,
And have not seen you since,
Have not spoken with word of elegance,
Not found word strong, vocal, and profuse.
I clamored up to your home, seeing the fire of your castle,
Begging the flame to inhabit my own chest,
Light my hearth with sacred fire to never be quit.
Iron fences gird your land, seeping the heat from my hand,
As I hold and peer through them,
At your garden and rows of billowing wheat
The trees of peaches hung high and ripe,
Apples shining like emerald and gold jewels in the sky,
Pomodoro’s and huckleberry
Splashing ruby and sapphire into greenery’s canvas.
A single splash of salivation dripped from my lip,
Desire for such beauty, colors in balance, diversity in moderance,
A seduction of art, I want my canvas to be painted with this beauty.
I stand there watching the fruits and leaves shimmer in midnight’s breeze,
When a boy rushes beside me, his body a green glow,
A Dionysian shade, leaping like a dog over the fence,
He lands— and he chases, hungers,
His figure flailing in a mad dash for the laurel,
The fruiting trees and shining delights before his eyes,
Like a new GameBoy at his birthday surprise.
I watch, hands gripped upon the bars,
Like a prisoner watching the mad dashes of escapees
To a freer world.
The boy reaches out his hand to touch the fruit,
It is there, so tantalized,
He heard stories of this moment,
A mother’s grip, sweet voice telling him
One day, you too, will know,
And he smiles. He is here with his mother.
The escape, the fever dream’s end, the juice to flow
Into his mouth, filling veins with sparkling golden cider.
I watch him trip, and he falls to the ground, far from fruit,
Vines wrap round, boas of thorns, tighten and rip,
His young skin tearing under the coils,
And I hear him scream for his mother,
Then the glow of his form fades under his pall.
The wind blows through the trees. They hiss,
A serpent chorus for wandering fool, echoes
Through the woods, through the hills,
To homes and hearths of dreams.
A girl now stands, looking beside my eyes,
A dress of Shirley Temple, button, pigtailed,
She watches, her ephemeral figure standing still in its glow,
And she climbs the fence, up she goes, down she drops,
Wandering among the crop rows, brushing their lush
Leaves with her palm as she strolls through the garden,
She remembers her father, wrapping his arms round her,
Placing a soft Cabbage Patch doll
In her slender fingers
Speaking in soft baritone,
You will be a strong woman,
She smiles, and of Herculean fruit is what she dreams,
The luscious fruit, giving its warmth to her,
No winter will last
The sweet nectar will drip from her fingers,
And she will have her own garden like Calliope,
Fruit for hers, from which children will steal.
She retracts, her hand, as the leaves bite fingers,
Thorns knick her palm, digging, embedding
They will not be forgotten.
Rose buds retract, wheat dies and writhes,
And hedges of thorns rise round,
She runs, in desperate throws to the shining fruit
Clouds of thicket form, they prick her dress,
Tear the cotton, red rip through her flesh,
Her vision chokes, darkness surrounds her solar fruit,
She reaches for the tree, and she disappears,
Washed away in a sea of writhing thorns,
Her corporal glow gone
The sea of vinery ebbs and shrinks
No trace remains, except for her dress, dragged
Away in the receding tide.
Rain falls from the sky, and the iron grate grows slick
My hands fall to my side
I back away
I look upon the fruit, locked with its aural gaze
I turn and run, away from the Heliconian garden
I run away
Shades of boys and girls, feverish and stoic,
Run against me, leaping and grasping for the metal grate,
Their corporal haze tracing through the garden
Disappearing before the roots of the trees
I run into the shadows of trees, forests of trees, plain and simple
There is no fruit for me here
There is only me
I lay upon my knees
Dig my hands into the sweet earth, feel Terra’s flesh pulse
My fingers drag through the earth, ripping the weedy skin
Soil reveals, filling with the sweet rain.
I stand with muddy hands,
And I will set out,
To find my voice again,
No desperate pleas to a untalkative fiend.
My voice is elsewhere,
My love too,
And I will find it,
And a garden I will till
For just me
And you.
Critique
First off, you have a certain lyricism in your writing that I find to be lacking in a lot of modern poetry, with parts that felt evocative of hymns and epics. The references to mythology (Calliope, Muse, Herculean fruit) strengthened this association—allusion is a powerful tool and a subtle way of drawing in the world outside the poem.
I would recommend that you lean into the allusions and avoid the modern-day references, such as those to the bands, the Gameboy, and the Cabbage Patch doll. It may have been your intention to place the poem in a modern-day setting while keeping an aura of myth, but these two elements clashed rather than complemented each other and came off as jarring.
You definitely had some fresh phrasing and lines: “boas of thorns”, “sea of vinery”, “feel Terra’s flesh pulse”, but there was also some amount of tired language. Poetry should avoid the familiar and the cliché. Some words and phrases have been used so many times and trodden into the ground that they no longer hold the power to shock us or bring the author’s vision to life. These lines, for instance:
Desire for such beauty, colors in balance, diversity in moderance,
A seduction of art, I want my canvas to be painted with this beauty.
“Beauty” is one such tired, overused word. This is not to say that you can never use it, but you should be careful about whenand how often. Because you used it twice in such close proximity, it has little effect. “Beauty” evokes little feeling or fresh sensation, especially when compared to a previous line:
Pomodoro’s and huckleberry
Splashing ruby and sapphire into greenery’s canvas.
These two lines are far superior and what I would like to see more of (though Pomodoro’s should be pomodoros, as you are not showing possession nor a contraction). Pomodoro and huckleberry are a fresh combination. They evoke color, and as the reader, we can see them splashed onto “greenery’s canvas”.
Your strengths lie in your lyrical musicality, and your ability to paint a lush and wild narrative. Thank you for sharing your work with us!
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