Sunday 12 February 2017

Monstrous Wave (Unfinished)


Behind me rose a wave, a monstrous wall,
A childhood wide, a thousand nightmares tall.
A vision from the madness in my head,
And equal to the fearfulness and dread
You’d find in Hell. Behind me stood the wave –

Whilst I, astride some watery steed, charged forth
Towards that awful end that waits for all.
I roared my final words into the into the void,
Defiant and determined to be heard;
And as those words like giant storm clouds swirled –
                                                Above me broke the wave.

I’m not sure where it goes from here. I wasn’t particularly pleased with it: there’s plenty of energy in it, but it seems dated and melodramatic (which I suppose complements the image: sea see below).

The final appearance of the refrain, at the end of the poem, is written in my notebook: ‘Around me crashed the wave’, so perhaps there was an unconscious reason to comply with Paul Valery’s notion that ‘Poems are never finished, only abandoned...’ 


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