No, Not this One! (after Anna Akhmatova) © Paula Grenside
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Commentary: The poem, though it may sound gloomy at a first read, is the awareness of a reality of evil and death as well as a rebellion, a shout not to accept it passively, but react and reaffirm life. It's not death that is scaring to me, it's what causes it in the world, and its blind harvesting in a personal context. It was a further death among beloved that inspired the first lines, but then Shakespeare and his great tragedies offered me images that embed all the evil existing in the world, the horrors caused by human weaknesses, death as the texture of life. It is human and easy to crash against death, violence, pain, impotence, but the poet has a way to react, to denounce, to shout, to rebel: writing! With the hope someone will read/listen. Paula Grenside |