Friday, January 02, 2004

Poem for Friday

Believing in Iron
By Yusef Komunyakaa


The hills my brothers & I created
Never balanced, & it took years
To discover how the world worked.
We could look at a tree of blackbirds
& tell you how many were there,
But with the scrap dealer
Our math was always off.
Weeks of lifting & grunting
Never added up to much,
But we couldn't stop
Believing in iron.
Abandoned trucks & cars
Were held to the ground
By thick, nostalgic fingers of vines
Strong as a dozen sharecroppers.
We'd return with our wheelbarrow
Groaning under a new load,
Yet tiger lilies lived better
In their languid, August domain.
Among paper & Coke bottles
Foundry smoke erased sunsets,
& we couldn't believe iron
Left men bent so close to the earth
As if the ore under their breath
Weighed down the gray sky.
Sometimes I dreamt how our hills
Washed into a sea of metal,
How it all became an anchor
For a warship or bomber
Out over trees with blooms
Too red to look at.

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How to thin your LiveJournal friends list, at least a little: admit that you are not ga-ga in love with ROTK the way you were ga-ga in love with FOTR and TTT when many people friended you. Heh.

I'm now wondering what it will do to my friends list if I admit that, while I enjoyed POTC greatly all three times I saw it, I found it to be a glossy movie that captured little in my imagination beyond a repressed impulse to historicize it and the random thought that Jack, Will and Elizabeth would all look very pretty together, as would Jack, Will and Norrington. That's to take nothing away from the laughter, sense of adventure and sheer fun of POTC: I walked out of the theater with a big grin on my face each time. But I've done more serious thinking about pirate archetypes after one viewing of Peter Pan than I did after POTC until I saw the most-appreciated DVD extras on pirates and piracy (the two-disc POTC:COTBP is one of the best DVD packages I've ever seen, and well worth getting, BTW).

Still, I can't help but wonder about all the people who think POTC is a better movie than M&C. If you're an O'Brian fan and just can't help resenting Peter Weir mucking with the books or Paul Bettany being too good-looking to be Stephen, fine, I understand that. If you adore Johnny Depp's Captain Jack so much that there's no room in your heart for any other, okay, I do think he gave a marvelous performance. I can see loving and adoring POTC in a way that leaves no room to love and adore M&C. But to think POTC is the better film, using any standards of plot, characterization, dialogue, cinematography beyond fantastic visual effects? Please explain to me where I should be seeing excellence rather than entertainment in POTC.

Gacked from Fileg and Seasalt, the following "Noooo!" disbelief and fear, though I guess on a quiz like this, some sort of horror was inevitable:

You are Elrond's other daughter.
What LotR Mary Sue cliche are you?

brought to you by Quizilla


I should be Aragorn's sister like Fileg. At least I am not Eowyn Sue! Friday Five and both appear to be on hiatus. Off to get lunch for the kids!

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