The Tangled Branch Discussion Forums

One neighbour forgets
until she hears the measured yawn of crushed rubbish.
She rushes her bin to the road,
bed-warm still in her morning robe,
to watch the tumbling mess
taken like fish in one gulp. 

Some bins have spilled their guts
to the wrath of a sudden gust.
They lie flat across the path
and court the eyes of eager birds.
Another, however, looks more sedate,
a rock set on top, quite like a hat. 

All are shaped like coffins,
with contents destined for mounds,
carrying off our weekly past;
and as the road tightens to the shape
of parked cars around the machine,
a cortège forms of those who’ll be late for work. 

Men with hardened faces
rush and shout through the blizzard of noise.
They must say the same things,
must hold a language of looks and signs.
They and their sound will be distant soon,
busy burying others’ weeks.

The detritus of our lives on full display each trash bin day! Peoples trash can be as revealing as a personal diary.
Like the reportage of this visual poem.

Good one Trev.

The woman rushing out in her dressing gown...yep, seen that! Like the fish gulp.

Like the rock/hat

I feel you could work the disposal parallels more with the coffin image.

hardened...my bin men are more varied...cheery, in a rush, have a muscular vitality...one label feels unfair

Phil

It is an interesting subject. Bins contain so much of what we pretend and hope to be.

The poem starts very strongly and even with some dramatic urgency that I enjoyed very much.
After that though it lost that dynamic by searching too hard for meaning IMO and the language became increasing poetic and therefore less relatable for me.
For example,
Some bins have spilled their guts
to the wrath of a sudden gust - the spilled guts and wrath while being dramatic images made me ask to many questions that I knew had no real answer - Why is the wind wrathful? Is the wrath related to the bins? Is it just a strong image? In what way is the content of the bin like guts? 

I have no idea if this is good or bad but I was not convinced by them.

I actually think these kinds of poems are the hardest. Finding a balance between the mundane and finding a poetic narrative that raises that mundane. I am still reading this and trying to work out if that balance works for me

 

By the way apropos the last line - as if it is important that it works for me !!!ha ha:-)

Thanks very much for yere input, Eric, Phil and Dave. I might change the hardened faces to some other kind, Phil. Will see. 

I think you're right, Colm, but where does it start to go off: Is it from the coffins line on, or from the weekly past line? Or maybe from the last verse on?

Thanks,

Trev