[brigits_flame] prompt - ember

[1stmate]

Alone/Together

It never gets dark here.
The city is full of people
but is completely void of life.
That fire burned brightly once,
a lifetime ago, it seems:
everything in its path was consumed,
more than we can know.
Yet the cinders still glow
hotter than they have any right to.
Our flames burned
uncoupled. Across millions of lives,
the fight never ends.
Sentiments will always travel
without hope.
We are nothing.

We are nothing
without hope.
Sentiments will always travel;
the fight never ends.
Uncoupled across millions of lives,
our flames burned
hotter than they have any right to,
yet the cinders still glow
more than we can know.
Everything in their path was consumed
a lifetime ago, it seems:
that fire burned brightly once
but is completely void of life.
The city is full of people;
it never gets dark here.

---

author notes: truc_d_ouf's poem for week three of august used a similar reflective pattern which was shamelessly stolen for this entry, though something different came of the reflection in this piece. credit for that idea! dedicated to my platonic partner, who rambled at me over the phone for half an hour while i scribbled ideas and muttered incoherently before the poem itself would deign to be written.

Comments

[bluegerl.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the song (which I like to think as 'mine') 'I've looked at clouds from both sides now' and the marvellous thing with this poem is that it makes sense forwards and in reverse mirror image. or whatever. Forwards and back to the start... Its' so CLEVER, and makes such sense!!!!

I love it!!! wow. and the pictures in the first stanza are different to the ones in the second... so it isn't mirror image... it's.... wondrously clever and thoughtprovoking! Thanks so MUCH to whoever you were rambling to on the phone!!! If they were the ones who began to shape this!

Bless you, Blue.

[keppiehed.livejournal.com]

I remember truc_d_ouf's entry, because I had never seen anything like it. And you have made this not only a trick of wordplay, but so heartfelt. You are blowing my mind, really. It must have been beyond difficult. How did you do it?! I've been trying to work it out, but it's seamless and gorgeous. Something in it glimmers of I Wonder How Many People in This City from Cohen's "The Spice-Box of Earth". That is just about the highest compliment I can think to give you.

[ribcagerebel.livejournal.com]

Primary editor
[[I'm new and still figuring out this site, and this is my first edit for it! I'm so sorry for the delay and hope I don't get cut for this. I just found out yesterday, so here goes!]]

Grammar
first stanza: "hotter than they have any right to." ends in a preposition. Not a big deal for me unless you care.

second stanza "our flames burned
hotter than they have any right to," This must've been a tricky negotiation. It makes sense in the first stanza, but when you move the punctuation around, the tense doesn't match here. Ad lib the nouns and verbs in my suggestions, of course, since my examples miss your effect: "hotter than they should," "hotter than would be decent," "hotter than virtue would allow." I like the effect of "right" and its connotation so it's up to you to accept or adjust.

I am so thrilled to see this applied appreciation for punctuation.

Content/My Feels
The details are dim and sparse, which I'm reading as intended because of "more than we can know," which has the nice chill of being forgotten or trimmed by the many retellings of history. The first stanza is bleak!, and I wasn't sure what was going on when I started reading, but then I finished, and I loved how the second stanza mirrored the first. I haven't read many poems of this structure, but I find the structure to be fun and am glad you chose to experiment with it. I'm assuming experiment since you credit the idea to someone else. I like how by the end I can see how the title plays into the poem. We are together in the struggle of the first stanza.

I'm intrigued by the suggestion behind the last lines of both stanzas and the contrast of their mirror roles, "We are nothing" and "that fire burned brightly once / but is completely void of life. / The city is full of people; / it never gets dark here." I'm imagining a cannibalistic fire. I'm intrigued by the motif of fire here. There's so much light to the point of destruction so that it never gets dark yet is void of life. I really like the feel of the last two lines, a fact, that's loaded with the connotations leading up to it.

[[That's all I have to sayyy. T.T I read your piece over 20 times. I like that this was inspired by listening to your platonic, it does sound like recalling a distant story. I feel like I haven't yet bled all the meanings and implications yet.]]

[silverflight8.livejournal.com]

Late editor is delinquent and embarrassingly late, but here is your second edit!

without hope.
We are nothing.

We are nothing
without hope.
This is particularly wonderful! Actually I think the whole poem's structure is marvellous, but, you know, this direct contrast is especially. I think it must be the sudden reversal of pessimism into something resembling optimism.

Sentiments will always travel;
the fight never ends.
-The sentiments part seems unhinged here, and I don't mean crazy, just that it is seemingly uncoupled from anything else around it. What does sentiments mean? (Thanks to tumblr, I'm getting images of Loki, but anyway).

yet the cinders still glow
more than we can know.
-A little more obvious here than in the previous stanza, because there's no punctuation, but glow/know rhymes unexpectedly and kind of throws off the unrhymed rest of the poem. (Like the poet/don't know it sense.)

everything in its path was consumed,
more than we can know.
-This, too, is somewhat confusing. We don't know what everything was? Mostly I am having these question marks everywhere because some parts of the poem are quite clear and it's a poem that's not coyly trying to hide its meaning, but there are some parts that don't seem to quite match up to the other lines around it.

our flames burned
hotter than they have any right to,
-Changing tenses here (burned/have any right to) - not a problem in the previous stanza where you have this sentence coupled with another line.

our flames burned
-(in the second stanza) I think you should put some kind of punctuation at the end of this, because my eyes just jumped right to the next line without pausing to take in the burned bit. It really is the central idea of the poem.

There are a few places where I think that the line lengths were a little odd (especially hotter than they have any right to, - I'm still not sure about the "have any right to" part) but I'm not sure if that would be doable with your current structure.

Again, I really enjoyed the format you used! This is excellent.