Monday, February 25, 2008

Nameless (23-Feb-2008)

This is in response to the call for a name poem from the virtual poetry group poem.

I just tore this one off and I will continue to apologize for the redundancy in my subject matter of late but a grieving process takes time. I am actually hoping that some of these assignments will help me generate works from other places. We shall all wait and see. Maybe I should just break down and do something completely trite...

Nameless


We bound ourselves together
And she named me as her own.

But then she walked away from me
Our name she asks me not to speak.

I am a phantom that lurks about
A mask to hide my hideousness.

How can one survive without
That which others use to find and save us.

2 comments:

paisley said...

How can one survive without
That which others use to find and save us????

by using the only weapon we really have... ourselves.....

Anonymous said...

from Therese (of Just One Poem group)--

I see this as a poem about divorce or any other kind of broken relationship. I like the notion in the poem that when two people are bound together, their names become the same one name, and other people in their community come to know them by that one name. Then, when the couple splits apart, their name, too, is split apart from the community. I like how this poem is composed in couplets (two lines per stanza), because those couplets reinforce the bond of the coupled relationship. The mask serves three purposes: it is a symbol of the inability to speak, it is a symbol of the loss of identity with a loss of a common name, and it is a symbol of tragedy. Keep writing, Phantom! (P.S. I'm sorry it took me so long to comment upon this poem).