Carolina Ebeid: The First Age of the Global Market
A girl reading a letter at an open window, the air scented with wet pavement. She’ll curve the paper into the shape of a shell and listen into the sea, its stammerings. She’ll read the hand not the words: brazen strokes of signature; letters that graph the cursive city-scape; hasty peaks then hesitation; then the black pond of a blotted pause. The tongue of the bell, too, speaks: Someone has been buried. Come, come home, it clangs. Music busies the street at noon. And always pigeons calling from the roof. Clear chatter of girls––like falling coins. And under this a desperate noise like wounded horses carted off, and under this the sound of something opening: row upon row of tulips showing their brilliant throats.
from the Fall 2009 issue
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Words without emotion, description without purpose–the elements are there for solid but vacant twentieth first century poetry. ‘Someone was buried’ along with this poem’s message. Years ago, in some graduate school course, Literary Criticism, the professor asked if a piece of literature can be successful even if there’s not one thing about it that anyone gives a damn about? Let’s hope for brighter days and tulips that talk, leave messages we need to hear.
This poem does a fine job of encapsulating the moments of inscrutability the world so often gives us. I think the secret is the invented ocean at the narrator’s ear, which seems to say that the world is often silent despite its noise, empty depsite its beauty.
Cute poem.