OTI:one poem and notes:7/22/16

Open To Interpretation

Milton

'O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth. '
That's some thought, Milton, for your
Sister friend, Lycidas nicknamed,
But what lament could you fashion
For a beheaded Syrian boy
And a rubble field with shredded children?
I hold my cup under the soda machine's ice dispenser,
And one cube falls apart,
And rests between my thumb and forefinger's grip,
That webbed platform of skin there.
A dull pain a sudden,
Out of proportion to one ice cube,
But it hurts, and I switch my grip and shake my hand.
Warmth gently returns,
'Wafted' another term.

DolphinWords


Notes: I don't know how I got to reading Milton, not Milton, but Poetry's biography take...oh, I did see a bit in passing where he goes on about Narcissus in a couple of his poems, in one, Eve replaces Narcissus...now they hold up mirrors to Dolphins and the Dolphins recognize themselves...dilemma is when we look into one another's eyes, we don't see, recognize, ourselves...might say humanity is in a state of pre-recognition of our own humanity...an odd thought, but if you can't see yourself in others...Milton distinguished between Shakespeare and Ben Johnson as two different sorts of playwrights...one with a scholarly education, Johnson, and Shakespeare had a self taught, limited schooling one...and Shakespeare the better for his, as he was unhindered by scholarship...something Milton recognized himself as being hampered by...but Milton soldiered on, and wrote up a lot, poems and prose, to the delight of scholars, who write about him only second to Shakespeare!...or so I have it from Poetry's take...I can't sit on a bench in a Cathedral...seems a massive diversion...Milton is another of my poems about other's 'I and You'...'Sister friend'...I have it that in gay community parlance, a 'sister' is a lover who is chaste...a gay couple not engaged in sex are called 'sisters'...a civilization not engaged in sex?...seems a few going on about that, which is likely why Gauguin fled to Tahiti!...reference Milton's poem Lycidas, the only one I read in school about...I really envy how these old poets go on about flowers, and grottoes, and brooks, and such...they wanted much to capture the feel of the old Greeks and Romans, and I suspect they'd all been a happier lot just chucking the Black Book and its heaven sent gloom...

:)

DavidDavid