By the Wayside by Ashley Suzanne Musick
by Jonathon | 2.16.12
A baby blue bowl, overturned,
Sums it up somehow:
Trees march up the hills,
Casting a green cape across the soil.
A gray ribbon winds between the mounds of earth
As cars—bright, boldsome gems—speed along the path,
Glinting brilliantly in the sunbeams,
Rushing from one place to another,
Thoughtless of the beauty surrounding them.
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Ashley Suzanne Musick was born in Fountain Valley, California, on February 26th, 1989, and raised and homeschooled in Anaheim. In 2010, she moved to southwest Kern County, where she lives and works on a farm and writes in her spare time.
February 16th, 2012 at 11:31 am
I like how the shape of it turned out: good-looking poem. Thanks for bringing it to WIZ.
February 25th, 2012 at 11:31 pm
Thoughtless of the beauty surrounding them.
And yet this poem somehow makes the vehicles part of that beauty.
However, Ashley, this idea that we’re disconnected from the life of this world is a recurrent theme for you, and a right one. When we wind into earth as well as into heaven, we feel better.
I like that you call attention to this commonplace dissociation.
February 26th, 2012 at 1:14 am
Hopkins (again) felt it in “God’s Grandeur”:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Ashley’s poems picks at the same thing, as you point out, Patricia. We are in it, it is around us, and though we are disconnected from it it persists all the same.
I thought, to, about Wallace Stevens’ jar on that hill in Tennessee.
February 26th, 2012 at 1:15 am
*I thought, too, . . . (Lazy fingers this morning.)