Monday, December 01, 2008

Great voices rising like smoke from time’s wreckage

--- Poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg, lines from "The Living Room" (1982), collected in Fifty Years of American Poetry, Harry N Abrams 1984, p. 210

The full text of the poem is posted in the article Art into poetry by Peter Steele, Eureka Street, Jul/Aug 2005. Here's a fragment

... ... ... ... ... She enjoys
Bach in Heaven, his sacred Fantasies
For her alone spin like fabulous toys.
Lines shift and break, she finds it rich and right,
Such music out of black dots on the page,
Symbols, the world a symbol from her height,
Great voices rising like smoke from time’s wreckage.
...