“Time”: A Memento Mori after Stephen Crane
A shorter poem this time. It was written back in 2016 and published in The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Volume 18.2 (2024). Link to the journal’s website here and text of the poem below.
TIME I saw a body on the stair Reduced to bare and hoary bones As cold and grey as lifeless stones With neither hide nor hair. I saw a creature squatting there Which gnawed upon those ancient bones – It heard my footsteps on the stones And turned back with a glare. It scrambled from that crumbling stair And left the dry and pock-marked bones – And then I saw they were my own Though lying cold and bare. *
Whether consciously or unconsciously, I was clearly thinking of Stephen Crane’s little poem “In the Desert”: read the text of this poem here.
That poem is superior in its mysterious evocation of the mysteries of self-identity and suffering (“But I like it / Because it is bitter/ And because it is my heart.”). In contrast, my poem only offers a simple time-worn lesson: memento mori.
The key difference is in the form. The grim nature of the scene and subject matter is, I think, offset by the light and lilting quality of the verse, with the same rhymes repeating in the three stanzas. This would of course become tedious in a longer poem, but in a short poem I believe the effect works. Form, description and theme work together to create the impression of a strange dream, an impression that is not totally unpleasant (I hope!) in spite of the grim imagery and subject matter.
*
This June I will make several submissions to poetry magazines, online and in print. Anything that is printed will eventually be shared on Substack as well. Wish me luck, and any recommendations on appropriate venues for formal verse are welcome.
Image source: Cropped from an image on Wikimedia Commons listed with public domain status: File:Dessin d'une nature morte "memento mori" par Désiré Monnier.jpg