More Phantaian Poetry

I have posted several pieces of my poetry in the website this year. Most of them, like this one, were written around 1989-1992, and represent a time in my youth when I was exploring a connection between my feelings about the wild woods in Louisiana, and the Phantammeron book. The meaning is directly tied to specific characters in the book, or relationships in my life. But I like to think the poetry stands on its own separate from any real meaning connected with the book. This one is a little darker than most.

This is one of several poems I wrote during a couple summers where I camped alone in certain remote sections of the Kisatchie Wilderness in central Louisiana. Its a really beautiful place and in the late 1980’s was rarely used by most campers. I would drive my car out to the woods as a young man and camp for a few nights, painting and write poetry in the woods. It was a magical time in my life and a period where I needed to see these beautiful places and experience them as a young man, before they would be destroyed by the clear-cutting that now has all but destroyed much of our southern forests. I will never forget the solemn beauty and mystery of being in these old forests alone as the sun set over the horizon and the creatures of the forest began to come out at night.

Janedd the Endless Wood

Like this endless wood
your heart once was boundless
but the trees that shelter now
hide away a secret about you
and the oaks there
that crystal waters once had fed
have died and blackened all around you

All day long a blasting sun
beams down and feeds you
but by night an evil shadow dwells therein
and fills you with dred
while the dizzing madness of the sky
with all its blazing stars
laughs and giggles overhead

And all things at twilight
awaken now your woody rhythms
with stirrings that eons
have not changed
Since that day of days
when a heart was born and broken
which set in motion
this wilderness of grief
and dried up trunks of withered age…

 



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