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the unspoken

by oskar 

Posted: 05 December 2008
Word Count: 169


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The Unspoken

On the top of the Welsh dresser in the kitchen coffee, tea and
milk jugs made of tin stand in an unemployed group, reminds
me of a set of middle aged people, not the kind who do work
outs, are ambitious, talk fast and laugh loudly while sizing
each other up with jealous eyes. No, just regular gray people
at a shopping entre near a housing estate that hasn’t drowned
in graffiti and populated by the unlucky who are losers before
they are teenagers; I think they are gentiles with dust on and
too polite to speak badly of anyone, lost in thought waiting for
a bus no one has told them will not arrive to take them back
whence they came; to a fabled place were summer lasted long,
winters had proper snow to ski on and frozen lakes to skate on.
Utensils made of tin, not quite silver, tell of a time that never
was, when they were polished and shone in gentle candle light.







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Comments by other Members



Emily Lockhart at 19:59 on 07 December 2008  Report this post
Hi Oskar,
I really like the idea behind this poem and it's casting back to a bygone era. Your style of presentation is unusual and at times it did run together a bit and I had to re-read a few of the lines (the first one is a bit wordy - maybe leave out 'in the kitchen' and say 'reminding' instead of reminds), but overall I really liked your approach and the bitter undertones. Just one tiny thing that may sound stupid, but the idea of skiing jarred with me - surely, if I'm placing your poem in the right time-frame, tobogganing would have been more the thing? I realise that the word 'ski' fits in better, so maybe I'm just being a nitpicker, but for some reason it struck me as I was reading and I hate to see it detracting from your poem! Maybe instead say: snow to roll in/play in/slide on?? I also really like the last image of the utensils and the gentle candle light - there's a real poignancy to this and I was particularly struck by the phrase "a time that never was", as if you are questioning the idea of far away hills being greener or 'old days' being better. I hope my comments and suggestions won't seem intrusive - I've never critiqued a stranger's work before, so feel free to do the same for me! :-) Emily


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