I Call, You Respond

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A Guest Series Curated by Nicole Rollender. Intro to project here.

Call and Response: “The Days”

The late, great Jon Anderson used poetry as a vehicle for stark (and possibly uncomfortable) self-reckoning: “My prime motive for writing is self-confrontation, and I find poems the best way to employ language to do this. My poetry isn’t for everyone. It’s for people like myself who want to contend with themselves. I think of my poems as intimate conversations with close friends, to whom I’m not afraid to reveal my vulnerabilities and loneliness.” The poem, “The Days” comes from In Sepia, which was Anderson’s third book of poems. His poetry is spare and controlled – but movingly precise in emotion and observation.

 

The Days

All day I bear myself to such reward:
I close my eyes, I can’t sleep,
The trees are whispering flat as water.

My friends’ grayed faces
Do not alter with the weather anymore.
We sit by a stove & talk.
We suffer the terrible news.

Into a world made over & over
You rise each day,
You remember,
& something goes wrong.

God, if I had a wish, I swear
I wouldn’t know what to spend it on.

 

RESPONSE #5: by Mark Pricskett

 

I understood from my first reading of “The Days” what Jon Anderson was experiencing. I wanted to write a short poem of my interpretation of his poem. Anderson seemed to be expressing an emptiness that comes from a repeated barrage of negativity – something that recent times seems to have no shortage of. My poem has a similar tone but tells of how we see ourselves, surrendering to the aging process.

 

My Surrender

As the color leaves my hair, it leaves my eyes.
The brilliance of experience flickers now.
Everything I need to know, is known.
Everything I want to know doesn’t matter.

Is weariness after the well-dug trenches I’ve created
over time what I feel now?
Is it time that shows its own weariness?

When I have no urgency for my questions to be answered,
and you feel the same, my friend,
that will be our last surrender together.

***

Mark Pricskett has been a visual storyteller for over 30 years, occasionally committing to words also.