# The sun rose, just there, today



## garza (Jul 5, 2011)

The sun rose,
just there,
today,
beside that tallest tree that marks
the branching of the village street
to right and left around 
the green
that children use for football 
as the day
ends.

I watched the dark
divide
and fall away to right and left,
blackbird calling  
the day to come,
calling the light to come. 

Yesterday?
Do not talk to me
of yesterday, dead,
its ashes buried over night.

When the dark 
divides 
and falls away, 
no shade  
remains to haunt
the light of this new day.


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## Firemajic (Jul 5, 2011)

I love the quiet, melancholy feel of this poem, very clever of you to use as few words as possible --each word carefully chosen. wonderful melodic flow and the last stanza brings the poem to a wonderful conclusion. If I had any nit to pick--I just wish it was a little longer--I could have read on and on...   Thank you .   Peace....Jul


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## Gumby (Jul 5, 2011)

Very nice, my metaphoric mind read so many things into this one. From the peaceful surface observations, to a deeper, spiritual observation.


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## garza (Jul 5, 2011)

Thank you both. Your kind words much appreciated.


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## SilverMoon (Jul 5, 2011)

garza, Yes. Your economy with words makes this a very clean read. Nothing extraneous.

I was quite taken with your play on words, here. Very smooth, not so obvious.



> beside that tallest tree that marks
> the branching of the village street



And perfect. The title, the first three lines. Brings me into the "now".

A beautiful read. Laurie


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## Bilston Blue (Jul 5, 2011)

I don't normally browse the poetry pages, Garza, but after reading this I'm glad I stumbled on here. I didn't take you for someone who would write like this, though I don't know why. It's funny how we develop preconceptions without really knowing somebody.

I really like this. I think you might have been wasted on hard news.   :salut:


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## garza (Jul 5, 2011)

SilverMoon - You always can see what I say. You're the first to notice 'tree' and 'branching'. Thank you.

Bilston Blue - Your comments are much appreciated and I thank you, but don't knock the hard news. It paid the rent and bought the groceries for over half a century.


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## Squalid Glass (Jul 5, 2011)

This is so lovely. My kind of poem for sure. Here are my thoughts:



garza said:


> The sun rose,
> just there,
> today, *I would suggest putting a semi colon here to give a little space. Your first three lines are SO beautiful, I would like a little more time to reflect.*
> beside that tallest tree that marks
> ...


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## jeffrey c mcmahan (Jul 5, 2011)

Garza; A very elegant poem. The first, second, and third lines introduced a strong sense of time and place. The following lines bring sharp imagery, following a smooth progression. The first stanza ends strongly. In the sec. stanza, I like the phrase, "Dark divide." that and the alliteration in the final three lines were smooth and natural. The poem is complex and deserves further reading.

Regards


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## garza (Jul 6, 2011)

Squalid Glass - I've not replied sooner because I wanted to give careful thought to your suggestions.

Changing the commas to semi-colons in the first stanza would spoil the rhythm, at least for me. The first stanza was composed aloud while watching the sun rise and only minor changes have been made since. I have a little Acer eMachine between my bed and a northeast-facing window. The machine is used for early morning writing and occasional late night note taking, and I enjoy watching the sun rise this time of year as I write. As soon as I spoke the words that became the first stanza I opened a new Notepad window and wrote them down. They rested for a day, and I worked on the second stanza, which took the most time to write. 

The comma after '.._.fall away to right and left_' feels right to me. Part of that has to do with rhythm, a desire for calling up the image of blackbird - not 'a blackbird' or 'the blackbird' or even 'blackbirds',but rather the essence of blackbird - quickly, just as the chorus of blackbird song just before dawn rises quickly and is an essential part of the coming of the new day. 

Add to that a natural dislike of colons and semi-colons, with their formal and semi-formal appearance and officious behaviour. The lowly comma is more my style.

The repetition in 
_'blackbird calling  
the day to come,
 calling the light to come'_
is deliberate and is intended to sharpen the image of blackbird. We have many species of tropical blackbird, and each has a distinctive call. One characteristic they all share is repetition - the same call is voiced over and over. Those who are expert at this sort of thing can identify the species by the call. (Or at least say they can. Personally I think they're only trying to impress those of us who enjoy listening to the birds and don't care what its name is.)  Thus the initial reason for the repetition in stanza two.

After writing it, and saying it out loud, I realised the lines evoke another image - that of a shaman chanting an invocation to his god or gods. Again there would be repetition, especially in calling to Kinich Ahau, the Lord of the Day, who has, hopefully, completed his hazardous journey through the underworld from the west, ready to bring the light of the sun back to the world.

When the second stanza was finished the fourth stanza wrote itself and only wanted typing out for the poem to be complete, or so I thought. Monday morning I was having breakfast in a cafe in Corozal Town and overheard the manageress having an argument with an employee who brought up what had happened the day before. When I heard the manageress' response out came my pocket notepad and pencil.

_'I don't want to hear about yesterday. Yesterday is past and gone. Today is a new day, bright and shiny.'_

From that I developed the third stanza, and here I agree with you that the 'dead' is not needed, that in fact it weakens the effect of the last line of the stanza without adding anything. 

Thank you very much for the attention you paid to the poem. 

jeffrey c mcmahan - Thank you for your comments. You help me appreciate my own poem better.

To everyone who has commented - thank you very much.


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## Bloggsworth (Jul 6, 2011)

There's a lot to like in this poem, but I have a few questions about lines that trouble me.

The sun rose,
just there,today__________________________________________It rises every day, we don't need to be told
beside that tallest tree that marks
the branching of the village street
to right and left around                                                 ___________________________________ If it branches it would wouldn't it
the green
that children use for football 
as the day
ends.

I watched the dark
divide
and fall away to right and left,                                   ______________________________Right and left again
blackbird calling  
the day to come,
calling the light to come.___________________________________The word _*come*_ twice in two lines 

Yesterday?
Do not talk to me
of yesterday, dead,
its ashes buried over night.  ________________________________Why? What happened, are we not to be told.

When the dark 
divides 
and falls away, 
no shade  
remains to haunt  _________________________________________Does shade _haunt_? It might obscure, hold back or subdue
the light of this new day.


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## garza (Jul 6, 2011)

Bloggsworth - Had you read the post above yours you might have understood the poem better. However, I'll try to explain as best I can.

The sun never rises or sets two days straight in the same place. The opening tells where the sun rose on that particular day. I watch the sunrise every morning and can now point to where the sun will rise on the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice. It's a simple observation you can make for yourself.

The first use of 'right and left' is tied to the play on words with 'tree', 'branching', and 'green', intended to produce in sketch form an image of the centre of the village where I live. 

The second use is deliberate repetition. How do you say 'daybreak' without saying 'daybreak'? The repetition also ties the coming of the light of day to the image of the tree, street, and green. 

The word 'come' is used twice in two lines to echo the repetitive call of blackbird and the repetitive invocation of the shaman in calling for his god or gods to appear. In this case the god would be Kinich Ahau, Lord of the Day, who sinks into the underworld in the west at sunset and must battle his way back to the east by morning to bring light to the Earth. I hear the blackbirds around my house burst into song shortly before daylight every morning, and on two occasions I have been privileged to be present at an altar in the bush to hear a shaman recite his invocation, calling on Kinich Ahau to bring his warmth and light, and asking Cha'ac not to withhold the rain. Again, there is further explanation in the post just above yours.

All yesterdays are dead, their ashes buried in the nights that follow. We start every day fresh, or at least we should.

A common literary use of the word 'shade' is to mean 'ghost', and 'haunt' means the action of a ghost in remaining in a place. Thus no shadow (the first meaning of shade) or ghost of yesterday (the literary meaning of shade) remains to dim the brightness of the new day.

I am sorry you missed the point of the poem. I shall try to do better next time. Meantime, if you will but read the post immediately before yours you will find further explanation.


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## Bloggsworth (Jul 6, 2011)

_*Kerpow! Splat! Nnnnnngh! 
*_
I feel like a character in a Roy Lichtenstein picture who has just got his just desserts.

_The second use is deliberate repetition. How do you say 'daybreak' without saying 'daybreak'?_  Dawn, sunrise?

I don't associate village greens and footballs with shamen, so I completely missed that - Must try harder.


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## garza (Jul 6, 2011)

Bloggsworth - If you've not yet read that explanatory post of mine that was written in response to a few suggestions from Squalid Glass, you will find the answers to most of your questions there.

Sunrise is a bigger cliché than daybreak. Think of a description that avoids over-used words. Create in your mind a dynamic image, a mini-movie. Try to imagine the dark sky split open as the first bright light of the sun pops up. Remember that we have almost no 'twilight' time in the tropics, either in the morning or in the evening. We can go from full dark to bright sun in, maybe, a little over a quarter hour, depending on time of year and weather. Kipling had the best line ever to describe it, '...where the dawn comes up like thunder...'. 

In the poem the village green and the kids playing football after school, '_as the day ends_', have nought to do with a shaman. All of the first stanza is scene setting, time and place. 

The reference to blackbird is in the next stanza, and you don't need to make a connection with a shaman anywhere to get the meaning. I only thought of that relationship after I'd written the stanza and realised the repetitive calls of the blackbirds are much like the repetitions in a shaman's invocation.  Again, there is an explanation in the long post referenced above.

I will now Google for 'Roy Lichtenstein' and perhaps I will understand better what you say.


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## Squalid Glass (Jul 6, 2011)

garza said:


> Changing the commas to semi-colons in the first stanza would spoil the rhythm, at least for me... The comma after '.._.fall away to right and left_' feels right to me. Part of that has to do with rhythm, a desire for calling up the image of blackbird - not 'a blackbird' or 'the blackbird' or even 'blackbirds',but rather the essence of blackbird - quickly, just as the chorus of blackbird song just before dawn rises quickly and is an essential part of the coming of the new day. Add to that a natural dislike of colons and semi-colons, with their formal and semi-formal appearance and officious behaviour. The lowly comma is more my style.
> 
> *Haha, then maybe it is my love for the colon and semi colon that inspired that crit. But, one man's opinion, nothing big.*
> 
> ...


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## garza (Jul 6, 2011)

I'm going to put this poem on my website, and the one change I will make at your suggestion is dropping 'dead' in the third stanza. The more I think about it, the more I agree with you.


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## jeffrey c mcmahan (Jul 6, 2011)

Greetings;

I think an artist, say a writer, can doth explain to much. An artist never benefits from explaining his work. Just as an artist has to know when to quit, and say it's done. So, as the moth comes to the light, so does understanding come to, as SG so boldly said above, come to a reader. Just one of us. One at a time.


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## garza (Jul 6, 2011)

jeffrey - What you say is no doubt true of artists. I wouldn't know. I'm not an artist, just an old hack writer. 

You are correct though about explaining too much. This was something I hated about lit classes at university, the tendency to over-analyse. I remember a graduate seminar on Stevens in which 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven', my favourite poem of all time, was hacked to pieces. Some months passed before I was able to enjoy the poem again, to sit quiet and let Stevens speak for himself. 

So far only one person has completely missed the point of 'The sun rose...' so I suppose that's not too bad an average.


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## J.R. MacLean (Jul 7, 2011)

Enjoyed very much, garza. I SO want to get to Belize one day.

'over night' should be 'overnight' in this context, methinks.

cheers

J.R.


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## Bloggsworth (Jul 7, 2011)

Just because I have a couple of issues doesn't mean that I don't like what I understand of the core of the poem, but clearly I am too thick to _get_ a poem that requires a page of explanation. I shall keep trying, I can be very slow on the uptake.


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## garza (Jul 7, 2011)

Bloggsworth - None of the explanation is needed to understand the basic idea of the poem. Most of the explanation was written in response to specific points made by others. 

For example your remark that the sun rises every day so there's no need to say it rises. But the sun never rises twice in the same place and the the point of the first three lines was to point to where the sun rose on that particular day. With regular observation from a fixed position you can learn to know the date within a day or two by watching where the sun rises and sets. That's how the Maya worked out their calendar round and how they defined directions differently from the way we do. 

Points about blackbirds and such are, you might say, backstory that you do not absolutely need to know to understand the poem.  

The first stanza of the poem is a very personal reaction to the start of one particular day, composed orally, as is almost all my poetry because of the way I was trained as a child more than 60 years ago. 

On reflection, afterthoughts were added in subsequent stanzas. 

What I do appreciate is your effort to understand the poem and your taking the time to comment. For that I thank you.

J.R. - Thanks very much. As for Belize, you might not enjoy it now. The rainy season is here in earnest so we are all cold and wet. 

'Overnight' is too fast. 'Over night' has a different connotation that fits what I wanted to say. If you read the poem again, leave out the 'dead' in that stanza. Squalid Glass has pointed out correctly that it should not be there.


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## J.R. MacLean (Jul 7, 2011)

> As for Belize, you might not enjoy it now. The rainy season is here in earnest so we are all cold and wet.



I will definitely schedule my visit during one of our Canadian winters.

Separating the words over and night makes over indicate place rather than time. It seems odd to me that something can be buried over something rather than under. But I'll not belabour the point- you are the craftsman here.

cheers

J.R.


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## Bloggsworth (Jul 7, 2011)

I did pass the History & Philosophy of Science exam, so I do understand that the sun rises and sets in a different place each day, none of which knowledge has anything to do with my opinion on need for the word _today_. It is just an opinion that you don't need the word _*today*_ to complete the thought - *just there *tells you that it wasn't anywhere else. That I didn't infer the presence of a shaman is my problem, not yours - I'm not good at reading poetic signposts, the _arms spread_ code for a cuicifiction, and the _shroud_ implications of spreading a white sheet on a bed, you know, that sort of stuff....


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## garza (Jul 7, 2011)

Bloggsworth - So take out 'today' at that point. Now, where to you put it back to explain that where the sun rose tells us we are talking about the exact day the poem was composed and no other day? 

There is no reference to 'arms spread' or 'crucifiction' or 'shroud' in my poem. If you are talking about 'shade' and 'haunt', those are not poetic signposts, but ordinary words and their meanings in the poem are common meanings that have been and continue to be widely used. 

J.R. - Next to the village where I live is a large nesting area of  snowbirds who live here in the winter months. They are mostly from the U.S. upper midwest and Canada.

Thanks for saying 'craftsman' and not 'artist'. Whenever you do come to Belize I'll stand you to a pint and tell you how my grandfather, who taught me to write, defined 'art' and 'artist'. 

I'll think some more about overnight and over night. You may well have a point that I'd not thought of.


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## J.R. MacLean (Jul 7, 2011)

Now I must go. To hear those definitions while being stood a pint sounds too good to miss.


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## Chesters Daughter (Jul 7, 2011)

I really like this, Garza. As one who watches sun rises/sets, your opening lines make much sense. Each dawn moved just a bit. I just wish that yesterday was ash. I rather liked dead there, implied or not. I also liked the repetition, it made perfect sense to me. I do believe I digested this piece as you intended, and it's beautiful.

Best,
Lisa


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## candid petunia (Jul 7, 2011)

Simply..._beautiful_. Each time I read it, it gave me new meaning. I loved the title, the talk about nature and the 'yesterday' part. Think I'm going to read this again now.


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