No Ephemera

[alonso ramoran]

No Ephemera


No ephemera will ever bring me to my knees,
as I am now before you,
Mother of all mothers, immanent Sophia.
I fear you inasmuch as I fear your abandonment,
and yours is the softest of voices.
Though sin is marked in every pore that forms in bone,
in the deprivation of the senses,
in obstructions of sorrow,
let sorrow and forgiveness guide this body,
until the days it may be without memory and frail,
so even then I may return to you with the grace that you possessed,
when you surrendered to my longing to know sorrow,
and permitted me a form apart from you,
a form submitting to you now.
Let this be all I know.

[matsunosuperfan]

No Ephemera


No ephemera will ever bring me to my knees,
as I am now before you,
Mother of all mothers, immanent Sophia.
I fear you inasmuch as I fear your abandonment,
and yours is the softest of voices.
Though sin is marked in every pore that forms in bone,
in the deprivation of the senses,
in obstructions of sorrow,
let sorrow and forgiveness guide this body,
until the days it may be without memory and frail,
so even then I may return to you with the grace that you possessed,
when you surrendered to my longing to know sorrow,
and permitted me a form apart from you,
a form submitting to you now.
Let this be all I know.

This really grabbed me from the jump. I think the first half is considerably stronger than the second. For me the strength is in the smoothness of the sound and rhythm. A lot of these lines have a really lovely, tangible cadence, like "and yours is the softest of voices." The iambic concern is motivating. 

OK reading again the first line is probably warm-up and can go or be reworked. Kind of feels like one of those "let's start with the thesis" things that we do before finding the poem's true shape:

On my knees as I am now 
before you, Mother of all mothers... 

Pretty clearly a stronger opener IMO. 

OK reading again again I am less satisfied than I initially was with the run of abstractions. Think we need a bit more concrete imagery and action. But the philosophy is compelling. I think this poem could benefit from an injection of narrative distance. The speaker may be working a bit too close to the subject in the latter lines, with the risk that things come off a bit maudlin.

Does the poet enjoy William Stafford? The reviewer recommends with enthusiasm the work of William Stafford.