Helen Chick
42. Standing Still
The tourists seem to think it’s grand
To photograph it in their hand,
Despite the fact that it’s a clichéd thrill;
While Galileo chose to throw
Two masses (so the stories go)
To see which one was first to reach the ground.
Now mighty work from engineers
Has gone some way to counter fears
That one day it would surely topple down.
Despite its problematical
Wild variance from vertical
Old Pisa’s leaning tower is standing still.
4 June 2013
Comments: I couldn’t get going on this one for ages. I was going to try something about me standing still, at the same time knowing I don’t (really (notwithstanding the fact that I have been doing some of the same things for a long time)) and the world doesn’t; I thought about the fact that re-watching favourite DVDs leaves the characters (and the actors who play them) stuck in a time warp, so that it is a shock to the system when you see them in another context much older (or dead!), but I didn’t feel like trying that to see where it went. Anyway, I had an idea I felt I could work with eventually, wrote the last three lines first (and still like them best), and worked backwards from there for a while until I realised that it wasn’t working exactly how I wanted it to (I wanted all the third lines to rhyme with “still”, but Galileo didn’t have the will (or anything else useful) and so I ended up constructing a rather odd rhyme scheme (and a commentary with far too many parenthetical comments)).
Themes to come: 43. Dying; 44. Two Roads; 45. Illusion; 46. Family; 47. Creation
Explanation about the 100 poems challenge here.
You really do have a penchant for parenthetical comments, don’t you? I
often note that many of such comments needn’t be parenthesised at all,
but could be a completely new statement on their own. Your last two
parenthetical phrases here are good examples of such :-). I wonder if
Fowler (Modern English) or Strunk & White (The Elements of Style) have
anything useful to say on the subject. My books are all the way across
the room so I can’t be bothered checking right now.
Liked the poem by the way, once I stopped trying to get a rhyme or
rhythm out of it. I didn’t pick the subject until Galileo. A little bit
of fun!
For most of my more professional writing I make the effort to edit my parenthetical comments, but some days, when it’s late and I’m in “stream of consciousness” mode, I can’t be bothered. I leave them here for my own bemusement, and also because I know it would slightly annoy a good friend and mentor of mine who used to discourage my parenthetical tendencies with firmness and red pen … or, at least, it would if she read my blog!