TERRIBLE NOISE, THEN

(someone must have heard it crash because it did)

There were three dead, maybe four,

names lost to us with the toxins

found in their post-mortuary bodies

Now we only remember how the silence yawned 

then stretched for days

t h e s i l e n c e

was an entity,

swallowing the island in its unrelenting fog

that leaked from houses like smoke

and filled the lungs of villagers

until

masts clanking in the bay became a hymn of our mourning

playing  while last traces of teenage flesh were scrubbed clean from the rocky facade

by thunderstorms, fleeting

and common on the coast

Even the children hushed themselves

taking breaks from their barefooted sand wars to stare out at the tempered sea,

eyes wide with ignorance.

Still, they felt ripples from the collision,

stirring in their beds

like animals before a storm.

Reviews

[TLK]

I've read all of your posted works so far, but have not found much to say as I see in them a great deal of you reflecting on your self. And, as a ruminator (comes with depression) I don't particularly feel a desire or ability to meddle with that.

However, this is a streaming comet of fiction straight from nightmare's sun. You set up the situation very completely in the first stanza. You juxtapose lost and found in an almost nonsense way, but there is a detective/coroner weighing of the facts here. One thing is gone, but another is found. It is all evidence.

You then set up another opposite -- the silence after the sound. The title sets us up -- that uncompleted white space after the "then", lacking even an ellipsis (truly the most poorly used of punctuations black tricks, so I award you three fried chickens (live) for your avoidance) -- and you intensify it by typographically stretching 'silence' out. You anthropomorphicise it. One oddness in the image is that the fog leaks OUT but is found IN the villagers after. I feel this might be more compelling with reversed lines, as it would then imply the fog being breathed out, and being human-to-human communicable.


Without checking the tags, which I saw were voluminous and therefore probably slightly too informational, it was here that I realised (upon my third reading) that the teenagers had been in the crash, that the silence was the terrible outcome of the noise, that you are taking the faceless self-victims of a more probable accident.


My personal take: The disease, as always, is blame. And the inability for blame to change anything, except to make us feel worse about ourselves and our decisions.

[anamezic]

Thank you for the lengthy and constructive review. I like your idea about the fog leaking out like breaths or words from person to person. I'll experiment with it for a little while and see if I can make it work. However, this piece is not fictional, it's actually one of my truest non- fiction poems. I was young when the crash happened, but I remember it shaking everyone I knew so vividly that I had to put it into words. Most of all I remember how they all tried to lay the blame, and then didn't say anything at all.

[TLK]

I knew you'd say that -- this is clearly from experience. However, I would argue that it's still more generalisable and universal than your other poems which I have read. And, in that sense, it transcends the personal.

[KAin]

this is a beautifully written poem;
there's an air of artistry to its construction.
I see myself easily becoming a fan of your work.
Keep it up!

[Gerald Parker]

Brilliant! I'm so pleased that I'm the first to stumble across the jewel of a poem - tragic though it be. It is outstanding and is the the first poem I have put into my favourites! So many brilliant lines: 'Now we only remember how the silence yawned
then stretched for days'- I'll not recover from the awe this have inspired me with. (Always a danger someone else has already said this, or something similar.) Thanks for contacting me.