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I burned my little house of shame
today. A torch I built of pitch
and sprays of purple cone, their heads
grown black for having bloomed. I looked
around to see if every act
I’d once locked in was, of its own
volition, out. A few remained.
The flame burned high enough to light
my way through paths grown in of where
I’d run away and no one knew:
too busy polishing their knives and spoons
in case the pastor came for tea.
The flame burned hot enough to wake
the genius who outside our gate
would sleep curled like a nautilus.
His eyes lit up. You’ve grown, he laughed,
into a decent reprobate.
The flame burned pure enough that bones
of quickened poets spun above
the ashes, and the anarchist
whose shock of copper hair I love
let out a canto-levered yowl.
This space is yours, now make it new!
I burned my little house of shame today.
~~~
“Make it new.” Ezra Pound, on the act of poetry.
© Elaine Stirling, 2014
This beautiful image of a purple coneflower, post-bloom, comes from http://www.identifythatplant.com
Oceantics 
Well worth the read Elaine, if for no other reason (but of course there are many) then to get to “let out a CANTO-levered yowl.” (Emphasis mine) You have certainly accomplished the bidding of the title with this one!
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You got the pun–of course, you would! I was in a very quiet university setting when that line came out, so I had to yowl silently…and it was still great fun! Thank you, Russel.
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Oh, boy, some poems send me right back to fifth grade, scratching my head because I don’t get it. Can you share with me some of what you were thinking and/or feeling with this one? I really want to get it.
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I’d be honoured, Mandy. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve taken a moratorium on tagging, that sidebar place where we’re supposed to put captivating clue-words like “inspiration, superior intelligence, had it up to here, stop judging me by my tags”…that sort of thing. 😉
This poem is about getting rid of the holdovers of things we were taught to feel bad about as kids, teens, new parents, all the stages of life. Once in a while, imo, it’s healthy to take a torch to it all, the way that farmers burn their fields to prepare for spring planting.
The poet Ezra Pound (of the copper hair, he was gorgeous as a young man) told another poet that if you’ve exhausted all the angst of your youth, you can still write about it, just “make it new”. When we lived in Mexico, a homeless American man, probably an autistic savant, slept outside our gated house. He called himself John Smith and never wanted to come inside. I thought of him for the first time in years when writing this poem, and it felt good to imagine what he might say if we met each other now.
Apart from the fun of making each line eight beats, until the final breakthrough nine–ta-daa!–that’s pretty much it!
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Burning my “little house of shame”–what a wonderful feeling that the house is little and that we can move on. Thanks for this, Elaine.
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Yep, Lutia…smaller than a tool shed and flimsier than balsa. Thank you for reading! 😉
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