Mimi and Mona Poetry: #3

About my four-line poem:

I am presenting it to the reader using the element of the language of indirection.

Learn more after you read this:

#3

Mimi Wolske

All Rights Reserved

The Northerly is absent this year;

When will that cold winter air across the border blow?

Oh, Boreas, let your breath bring his embrace to this Fallen Leaf

And pray, with me, he will never let me go.

At the center of this short poem is the speaker’s desire to be reunited with the one she loves (most obvious in lines 3 and 4). However, the full meaning of this poem depends on lines 1 and 2 as well.

We know the speaker is the Fallen Leaf because she refers to herself as such (line 3). She associates her grief with the wind; but, the speaker leaves to implication (or, indirection) just how the lovers and the wind are related. I worked on this poem so they (the lovers) are related in several ways.

The need to manifest and experience love is an inherent need, just as nature’s need for changing seasons and, in this instance, wind. We can think of it as love, like the wind, is natural.

The lover is living in a kind of drought, or arid state (a drying, fallen leaf) that only the one she desires can slake by his presence, his embrace.

The wind cannot be controlled nor can it be foretold, and human affairs, like the lovers' predicaments, are subject to the same (sort of) chance.

There are also associations with specific words; for example, Northerly and border, which the reader is probably only half aware of but contribute to the meaning of the poem. Their connotations provide indirections that enrich the entire short poem... they offer the reader the location of the one she loves. Fallen Leaf is an indirection because it isn't just about the time of year, it is telling the reader the lover is in the Autumn of her life.

Thanks for bearing with me as I explain what I wish you, my readers, to take away.

(painting: Boreas and Fallen Leaves, oil on canvas,35 x 26 inches, by Evelyn De Morgan — 1855 - 1919)