RonPrice
11-29-2006, 03:21 PM
DARK NIGHTS
Joyce Carol Oates says that Emily Dickinson's poem Number 410 is the most terrifying poem in the English language on the subject of a person's breakdown, their disintegration, the collapse of their sense of self. I have taken this same poem and altered it to reflect my own experience of varying degrees of inner terror off-and-on in the years from 1963 to 1980. This poem also sees my use of the word 'shit,' a rare instance in my poetry of slipping into the lower reaches of the vernacular, as part of a commonly used colloquialism here in Australia. It is a colloquialism I have come to take a particular liking for in my personal life. Although I don't often use this expression, it is such an apt one that it pleases my sensibility.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 23 March 2001.
The first dark night came long ago,
so terrible it was, but endured
and slowly, slowly, I did sing
when down the road I was fully cured.
My strings back then had snapped
beyond any daily use,
or to put it another way,
my bow it broke to atoms,
quite destroyed they were,
but endured again,
outlasted woe
and I saw a new, fresh morn.
The horror came again, again
and slapped me in the face.
My eyes were blackened both
and, then, the brain gave ease.
That ease came slowly,
nearly twenty years,
now I am another man.
Sometimes I break,
but never atoms
when the shit hits
that proverbial fan.
Of course, there's years,
could last quite long
and black could fill the eye.
Who knows what will
come down the tube
before I lie down and die.
Ron Price
23 March 2001
Joyce Carol Oates says that Emily Dickinson's poem Number 410 is the most terrifying poem in the English language on the subject of a person's breakdown, their disintegration, the collapse of their sense of self. I have taken this same poem and altered it to reflect my own experience of varying degrees of inner terror off-and-on in the years from 1963 to 1980. This poem also sees my use of the word 'shit,' a rare instance in my poetry of slipping into the lower reaches of the vernacular, as part of a commonly used colloquialism here in Australia. It is a colloquialism I have come to take a particular liking for in my personal life. Although I don't often use this expression, it is such an apt one that it pleases my sensibility.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 23 March 2001.
The first dark night came long ago,
so terrible it was, but endured
and slowly, slowly, I did sing
when down the road I was fully cured.
My strings back then had snapped
beyond any daily use,
or to put it another way,
my bow it broke to atoms,
quite destroyed they were,
but endured again,
outlasted woe
and I saw a new, fresh morn.
The horror came again, again
and slapped me in the face.
My eyes were blackened both
and, then, the brain gave ease.
That ease came slowly,
nearly twenty years,
now I am another man.
Sometimes I break,
but never atoms
when the shit hits
that proverbial fan.
Of course, there's years,
could last quite long
and black could fill the eye.
Who knows what will
come down the tube
before I lie down and die.
Ron Price
23 March 2001