..still today some of the finest documents are written on carefully prepared mammal skins..




Vellum

The  Calligraphy of love

those incisions into the soul

through skin and tissue

 

are but a writing

in the sand

until the skin

one writes upon

 

has been prepared the proper way
until it's been removed from

the life that shaped it

 

our love story

will be permanent

on pain of death

 





Poetry by Teddy Donobauer
Read 794 times
Written on 2012-04-29 at 07:58

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countryfog
How few of us still put pen to paper anymore, parchment vellum, Waterman fountain pen, my quaint antiques now.
E-mail, e-books . . . how enduring can words be when you can't hold them in your hands?

The cover of Mark Strand's "New and Selected Poems" is a fascinating copy of his hand-written worksheet for a poem. You can see it evolve as he changed words, struck through whole stanzas and replaced them with something entirely different, re-ordered lines, re-thought dead ends . . . one sees the work and craft of making a poem. Something is lost when we no longer have that for even our own works.
2012-04-29