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Saturday, January 7, 2012

Personal Challenge 5

Heaven set me a personal challenge last year and here is my belated response. Bad as I am with prompts, I had tried to wrap my head around the connotations of 'black and white', as ordained by her highness, and came up with this. I hope I have done justice to the topic and the challenge.




Past Tense

I guess sometimes the past just catches up with you, whether you want it to or not. – Paul Edgecomb in The Green Mile



















So far as I knew,
They were bottled in the basement
In prehistoric trunks
Piled beneath unlimited cobwebs and dust.

Though I had heard
On rarest of nights
Indistinct sounds from invisible source,
Thought they were footfalls of
Vermins on lawn,
That fritter in the hedgerows in dark.

Yet they’ve burst and pummel my days
And rattle my sense of time and tense
As lone I stand in some crowded shed
Straddled with shadows that snicker and sneer
On stages where curtains had dropped.

 Born from the ashes of unredeeming urn
They’ve gobbled my colours in tentacular mouths
And joined my bones to spokes of a wheel
Turning in caskets of black and white reel.

You, who shall chuckle and label this ‘vain’,
Heed, dear, calls of unacknowledged pain.


Words by Abin Chakraborty

10 comments:

  1. Somehow those old black and white movies, especially the horror flicks, were so much more sinister and creepy than those we see today.. You have captured so well the way those images may haunt one still, especially in the dead of night. Thank you for agreeing to participate in the personal challenge.

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  2. This is a super response to the black and white challenge, Abin, with one of the oldest horror movie monsters of them all, Frankenstein's monster!
    I love the the internal rhyme here: "And rattle my sense of time and tense" — I understand that feeling.
    I can't imagine what I would do if someone presented me with a personal challenge. Panic, probably. But you have handled it well.

    Kay, Alberta, Canada
    An Unfittie’s Guide to Adventurous Travel

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  3. I love what you did with this challenge. More than black and white reels, you captured the unredeeming urn of pain and angst, and haunted nights spoked in wheel and caskets.

    Past tense, not. Bravo and

    thanks for being a good sport.

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  4. yes, and the line "rattle my sense of time and tense" really made me stop and consider. so jarring, to have your sense of tense be off. i never thought to describe that. excellent!

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  5. Wow Abin, you rose to the challenge!

    I love "more than black and white reels, you captured the unredeeming urn of pain and angst, and haunted nights spoked in wheel and caskets"

    I love movies and you took me back to times where dust lingers, with fear n' magic! Great Job!

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  6. You may think the piece belated, Abin. I think it perfected. It flows with the ease and clarity of purpose that a well-edited poem conveys. You did us all justice!

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  7. the term "black and white" more than signifying moral good and evil stand, at least for me, for memories. maybe it comes with associating it with black and white negatives..memories, remember my dear friend, are wonderful things..as long as you don't have to think of the past...

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  8. Wow, Abin. This is fantastic! Especially your last line. Wonderfully written!

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  9. Very effective how you played off the "wheel" and "reel" images of being tortured and in pain. It gave the whole poem a feeling of disrupted time periods.

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