Concepts and Metaphors

Under an overflowing
ashtray sky, the train stops.
Frost seethes on scrubby sidings,
where naked trees stretch
pale, angular limbs. The engine
rumbles and we’re gliding
towards the tunnel of night,
on tracks lit up with winter aconite.

Kim M, Russell, 2018

Image result for winter aconites growing on railway sidings
Image found on Pinterest

My response to dVerse Poets Pub Poetics: Finding \Emotions and Concepts in Things, also linked to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Tuesday Platform

Sarah Russell is our guest bartender here at the dVerse pub today. She says that, in keeping with William Carlos Williams’ line from ‘A Sort of a Song’, where he reminds the poet about using metaphor and says “No ideas but in things,” our challenge is to take a concept or feeling — hope, joy, despair, longing, patriotism, anger, grief, etc. — and write a poem that captures the concept without telling the reader what the concept is.  It is up to the readers of the poem to name the concept or feeling in their comments.

Sarah has shared some inspirational quotations from Saint Augustine, Chekov and Wallace Steven and examples from a variety of poets.

60 thoughts on “Concepts and Metaphors”

  4. The ashtray sky….perfect image here. But the aconite by the tracks…makes me feel inspite of the images of doom and/or depression, there is hope. Aconite is blooming in a solid carpet of gold in the meadows here. Sunlight under the ashtray sky. that image will stay with me.

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  29. This feels like the challenging part of the journey (could be about career, marriage or maybe life in general). We have this audacious goal to keep going albeit slow because light awaits at the end of the tunnel.

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