#26 - Erased

Enough cutesy rhyming... here's my WTF poem.  You know how some people write these free verse poems that sound all depressing and you think, WTF, anyone could write that.  A thesaurus could puke that up!  Well... here's mine.  Strangely, it has taken just as long to write as the ones I take care to plan, so I guess it's not as easy as it looks.  And no, I'm not feeling suicidal.  This is a poem taken from a very famous poem.

See if you can figure out what poem it is. The explanation of the prompt style of poetry is below the poem. 

Once I, weary, and curious
nodded
as I muttered nothing.

Distinctly I remember
Dying upon the morrow

vainly;

lost, rare, and radiant.

The angels nameless,

sad,

uncertain.

Filled with terrors

before the beating of my heart

entreating late

entreating nothing.

Presently my soul no longer,
said truly forgive
the fact I gently
And so faintly

scarce heard.

Darkness.
Deep into that darkness

fearing,
doubting,

mortal before.

The silence broken,

darkness whispered;

Whispered an echo,

nothing.

My soul burning,
louder than before,
then nothing.

Here in saintly obeisance

above nothing more.

Then sad smiling,
grave and stern countenance,
Ghastly, grim and ancient.

Tell me much,

I marvelled plainly,
its answer meaning little.

Living was blessed.

Lonely soul,
nothing further uttered

scarce.

Leave me my hopes then!

Stillness broken,
caught from some unmerciful disaster;
One burden,

melancholy burden,
my sad soul cushioned

then sinking.

Ominous.

Grim.

Ghastly.

Ominous.

No expressing the fiery burn in my core.

Divining ease that gloated,

gloating.

Unseen by God,

these angels sent memories;

Forget evil,

or devil sent desolate horror;

Haunt this soul with sorrow.

 

Rare, parting,

a black soul.

 

Loneliness broken,

pallid dreaming.

 

My soul floating
Shall be lifted !

- Laura Freeman-

April 26, 2013

From today's NaPoWriMo prompt:

"Back in 1977, the poet Ronald Johnson first published RADI OS, an “erasure” of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Basically, Johnson took a copy of Milton’s long poem, and systematically erased whole words and even lines, while maintaining the relative position of the remaining words. You can see a brief excerpt here.
Today, I challenge you to perform an erasure of your own. You don’t need to start with a poem as long as Paradise Lost, of course, but a tolerably long poem is usually needed to furnish enough material so that the final product isn’t just a few words long (though erasure haiku might be a fun new subgenre). A few long poems that might respond well to erasure could be Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, or Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. Go ahead and copy and paste the text into a document, and then start whiting-out words. Or make a photocopy of a long poem you like, and mark over words on the copy. You can form a whole new poem just by taking words away! Once you’re done, you can leave the spaces as they are (I rather like the “ghosted” look of all that empty space), or take the left-over words and keep playing with them, reforming new poems from them. Happy writing!"