bardiphouka | Join the Party

Written for:

brigits_flame
Prompt:sanguine
Genre: Poetry
Word Count:184
A/N follow the piece

I could hear them there;
joining in the tall, green
and sun-soaked grass in
the late Kansas Summer.

Poppa was, Mrs Keyes said,
sanguine about such matters.
I was not sure what she meant
as bare limbs soaked sun and love.

That was in Kansas, long and
months ago in a time of heat.
Wagons strained to be off as
we played between the horses.

The air filled with the scent of
fertile grain. And then of mud
and autumn. I remember the dull
drudging of the trail, day by day.

And then everything turned white.
Deep white, moon white, shroud white.
I felt so tired and cold as the world
filled with white and then red.

I remember someone calling out:
“It's one of the Donner girls.
She's alive!” “You fool,
cover her. Don't let her see.”

I wanted to tell them.
I had seen bare limbs not long ago.
In the green fields of Kansas
they had moved in hope and love.

Certainly not this still and scattered around
the saw that had been their last caress.

A/N+ in the mid 18th CE there was a great American tragedy. A group of settlers on their way to the west coast were stranded in the middle of a blizzard and ended up being their own last supplies as it were. As it happens one of the survivors was a daughter of the leader of the party. I have used a bit or two of her book for colour.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, then, let me ask you this: If your professional editor is presumed to be flawless with the language, why ask for grammatical editing in the first place? I've spent the past five years as a professional writer and editor, and two before that as an English teacher. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw, and a clause from a preposition. ;-)

And the dashes: I find dashes to be extremely useful in aiding me to portray the cadence and meaning of my language. In fact, you are struggling to not use them, as I see in this statement in a previous comment:

But a comma does not provide as much breath as a semicolon does. That,cough, and I have been reminded of my tendency to overdo commas.

You are using a piece of grammar that (let's be hypothetical and say it's grammatically correct), raises red flags, and seems awkward to readers. And why? Because a comma doesn't provide the pause you need, and you've arbitrarily forsaken them. Emily Dickinson also championed the dash, and precedes Joyce significantly. The Devil is said to walk in the woods as well, and yet I shall love nature nonetheless. ;-)

I asked out of curiosity. As for the dash...You asked why, and I gave you a possible hypothesis. I did not say it was right. I did not say it was even logical. But here is the difference. I can handle knowing that I am antiquated in capitalising the seasons. And I can change that. But I still see no need to indulge in dashes. Esp when I cannot hear them. And that is what I use punctuation for in poetry, as a sort of a hearing aid. A breath belongs here, a semi-breath belongs there. It is how I was taught, both as a writer and as an actor. Now i need to see if I have my copy of When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. I am curious, did Bradbury use dashes also?

Edited 2012-03-25 22:43 (UTC)

My copy of "Something Wicked This Way Comes" is packed right now, or I'd check for you. However, I see from a casual glance at my unpacked books that the following authors use dashes regularly in prose:

Jane Austen
Edgar Allen Poe
John Irving
Joseph Heller

In poetry:

Elizabeth Sargent
William Shakespeare
Edgar Allen Poe
William Carlos Williams
Sylvia Plath
Stephen Dobyns
Robert Frost
Langston Hughes

I also notice on this "Ray Bradbury Quotes" site that he's often quoted with dashes:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/ray_bradbury.html

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