Thursday February 17th, 2011

The exercise:

Let's write about: melting.

We took a taxi out to the West End in Negril to watch the sunset one night. It was a beautiful location:


With a beautiful sunset:


With a beautiful wife:


I wrote today's piece either later that night or the next day, I can't remember.

Mine:

We watched the sun
Melt into the waves,
The heavens lit
By its final rays -
I thought we'd reached
The end of days.

But if it was
The passing of light,
It was not time
To give up the fight -
As after day
There's always night.

4 comments:

Greg said...

Kat looks resplendent in that photograph! And the lovely blue water looks so enticing as well in the first picture, it almost makes me wish I weren't sat in the middle of London in a glass-and-concrete office in an office park....
Your poem's really sweet, beautifully written and emotive, with just a gentle uptick at the end to lift the reader's mood. Bravo!

Melting
Pesky kids, thought the militia-man. He played the flamethrower's jet of oily fire over the still quivering mass of snow. They were always finding discarded magical antiquities and sticking them into their snowmen. The next thing you know, the snowman's come to life and is terrorising the local brothel.... He sighed, lowering the flamethrower and turning the flame down. The snowman was melting rapidly and looked mostly harmless now.
Now, how was he to explain why he was -- luckily! -- in the brothel when the snowman appeared?

g2 (la pianista irlandesa) said...

@ Loo: Those pictures are gorgeous!

@ Greg: I don't know if the "mostly harmless" bit was an intentional nod to H2G2, but I enjoyed that. I'm curious as to what happened beforehand.
- - - - - - - - - -
Living in my part of the state, you become very, very skeptical of the weather. Ours is a region known for having at least two seasons in one week on a fairly regular basis, and when it comes to severe weather predictions, we're more surprised when the storm matches--or even exceeds--the prediction. We're used to unpredictability, variety, and of course snow.

Lots of snow.

And you're used to it coming back.

Sure, there're'll be thaw periods, in some instances where the middle of February feels suspiciously like spring, and the snow melts enough that you can actually see the ground. But it'll be back.

It can completely disappear, but we know that it can always come back.

Even when the season's over, and we're really into spring, we still know in the back of our heads and the bottom of our hearts: that snow will come back.

It always comes back.

morganna said...

A little rondeau on melting:
It sneaks up behind you
Quietly, without much fuss
Or a whisper in the blue
It sneaks up behind you
and says winter is through,
Spring is upon us.
It sneaks up behind you,
Quietly, without much fuss.

--------------------
And yes, g2, we know the snow will be back here, too. But the break is nice.

Little creepy, there, Greg.

I liked yours and the unusual take on melting, Marc.

Marc said...

Greg - yeah, I'm rather fond of that picture of Kat as well. Definitely a keeper.

Luckily indeed. Great vignette :)

g2 - well, that was rather sinister. And completely true - I'm expecting we're about to go through a spring of 'now I'm here, now I'm not'.

Morganna - I like that it approaches 'without much fuss', but that it still sneaks. Sounds like spring to me :)