If anyone else needs an ear and a shoulder to lean on, I'll be around until the fatigue takes me. Though I hope Gutsposter isn't leaving like everyone says he will.........
In the meantime, has anyone got any poetry to share? I do! I wrote this for a Science Fiction RP I'm doing on a roleplaying forum, so if you'd be so kind as to ignore any spaceship allegories and instead focus on the more universal language/themes/imagery, that'd be great!
But I do prefer critical feedback, if anyone wants to take a crack at it, under that single parameter.
[Content warning: it's mildly lewd.]
"Elegy for Erich"
The mountains still stand in impatient clusters,
like tipsy partygoers
who the guest of honor's dodged.
They wait for you, I think.
They long for the boy who longed for them,
whose eyes hiked their voluptuous bodies
while his feet shone with valley mud.
It was, I realize now, the first of many omens:
there he is, we cried! That's him, the sherpa of men,
whose toes yearn to push against their blisters
and thrust him into the stratosphere,
whose youthful bosom bursts with sweat,
his spirit ripe with love.
Love? Like pain its shapes are many.
I took Hedy to the field tonight—
where the cricket orgy screams, their ecstasy deafening—
the one where you cracked your knee on a rock
chasing a firefly into the trees—
yes—that's the one—
I knew you'd remember—
and we sanctified that land tonight.
She took all its sins into herself, into her
heaving breast, her trembling legs. Even your knee,
and the blood the rocks stole from it,
we've cleansed those too, fiercer than any gauze.
We've slashed and burned old memories
and sowed ours there anew.
That field I scarcely recognize,
though still so warm and blue.
