Sunday, June 13, 2010

Water on the Engine

Utopia for seahorses,
who know no better than their brothers
as to what monstrosity sleeps in their waters.

Used and abused on the surface,
used and abused, and taken away.
And the last air bubbles rose and blistered
many, many years ago.

The Aztecs were its little brother,
the Egypts, its little sister.
The whole ocean belonged in its pocket,
the earth, a pearl plucked from its hand,
so young and supple and pure.

A nation-state of dreamers
with the resources
to take, take, take away
and make the truly beautiful
truly terrifying to behold.

They built the cold metal shells
of children stolen from the earth
and moulded into slaves,
abominations to the life-blood of the world.

Still now, I feel the shudder,
I feel the quivering anger
of an earth abused,
a crucial counterpoint
which sent it sliding from their clutches,
down, down, down.

It sits like an algae-coated castle
in a fishtank in the ocean,
it means nothing,
a utopia for seahorses
so forgotten in the deep.

Out of sight, it sits restlessly waiting,
it tries to warn us of our fate,
of our future beside it on the ocean floor
where the truly terrible
can become beautiful again.

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It feels good to write something that isn't for uni. This is a poem I whipped up tonight, and so I assume if you're reading this you've read the poem, so I can talk about stuff that might skew your perception before reading the poem. Like how this poem is about the lost city of Atlantis. If you knew that at the start, the imagery would be lost, and so, the target I've set out for in this poem is for people reading the poem to figure it out on their own, which I hope you did. The other thing I'm doing is juxtaposing the ancient myth with present day society and the whole over-reliance on technology. It's quite ironic that I've written it and distributed it via technological media, but that's a whole other thing. Another matter I'd like to address is the title. I wrote it before I'd fully figured out the meaning of the poem, and I tought maybe "Deus ex Machina" would be a better title, what with it being a literal translation to "God of the machine", meaning nature having more stability and reliability than technology. I don't know, would that work? Better/worse?

4 comments:

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  2. How can you write a poem about Atlantis and not mention Mermaids?

    Its good though.

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  3. They were never really part of the versions of the stories I heard.

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