WHEN I WAS BARELY 18 AND GREENER STILL

[Sue Littleton]

WINTER CHANT

(Note on poem: Written in freshman English class, 1950)

The sky is veiled in misty gray,
The wind, a shrew, is sharp and cold.
It’s a tired and bitter, harrowed day,
Already growing old.

The sluggish river, echoing reverberations
from its shore,
Groans aloud in vain;
The ice-blocks, with sullen crash and roar
Sound their dull refrain.

A sodden cloud drops frozen tears
That beat against the mountain’s hoary head,
Bent and weary with the weight of years,
Yet harsh and proud above the untilled fields
of fools long dead.

The forest, cloaked in a leaden pall of dimly
shimmering ice,
Shrieks out in sudden pain as a laden branch gives way.
The hungry fangs of winter ask a heavy price,
But who’s to say him, “Nay!”

[revolutionrabbit]

wow, you really had a feeling for language
at an early age, i guess you had good influences
i did not start out writing naturalistic, it took me
a while to even begin to be able to form some
clunky words together, but since i came out
of the tumult of the late 60's i had been influenced
a lot by psychedelic music, and of course Bob Dylan.
I prolly did not read a lot of the poets you did, it was
Rimbaud right off the get go for me, I know about a lot
of poets and writers, but my mentor was into the Beats
and then got into Surrealism, but I mentioned William
Everson, who was back in the 50's 60's was called Brother
Antoninus, who was there along with the Beat generation,
(who was influenced completely by Robertson Jeffers), who
was living in the area i was in, who held me in awe, he said
he was a "regionalist" and i recall him saying how he was not
like Poe, like the opposite of Poe who was a Classic American
Gothic, I did like Neruda for awhile, but i liked a lot of the
south american writers and poets.I have written heaps of poetry
but my little self-published novel a year go, holds my poetic soul.

i can't really hear the influence in this poem Winter chant, some
female writer and or poet, maybe a tad Poe too.

1950 was the year i was born

[Sue Littleton]

Rabbit, I am sorry it took me so long to reply, but I wrote you this incredible (speaking modestly, of course) reply about my life and all that jazz and my computer died just when I was trying to post it. Anyway, thank you for your comments. I was very lucky with a wonderful English teacher my senior year in high school and a boyfriend four years older than I who encouraged my writing -- as a matter of fact, my 1949-1950 poems are mostly love poems to Bob (who kept trying to find from whom I had plagerized my poetry). He was so smart and so handsome and I was so green I forgave him everything. I went to SMU because Bob resigned from the Air Force cadet program and was going to finish his studies at SMU. At the last minute he switched to Wheaton, leaving me to make a lot of varied mistakes with my young life, including marriage at 19.

Bob and I had a wonderful summer at Yellowstone National Park, where he signed on as college help at one of the big hotels and my parents and I travelled there in a trailer.

Here is another typical early effort, dedicated to Bob. Our relationship was pure and based mainly on the fact that Bob was a potential minister, a great kisser and could speak French and I was greenly green: (I don’t post this because it is so gaudy!)

INTOXICATING NIGHT

The midnight sky is a crystal-stemmed champagne glass, brimful.
The stars are scattered bubbles that shift and break
in brilliant glances,
Or float with delicate serenity to the rim of the heavens.
The moon is a cub of shadow-penciled ice
That cools the sparkling liquer of the darkness.
I pause beside a slender birch
and drink the champagne of the night into my soul
with thirsty gasps.

The sting of its coolness courses through my veins
like madness
And I am drunk wit the beauty of the hour.
Lost in a gossamer web of ethereal loveliness,
Tossed into the lap of the gods, unheeded and unheeding,
Spun downward into a bottomless pit,
Caught in the whirling pin-wheel of the universe.

To the heights of ecstasy, to the pinnacle of sublime being,
Then a sudden fall to the dejection of the lowly mortal
Who, having once shared the nectar of the night,
Can never cease to taste its sweetness on his lips.

i lose myself in the wonder of now and never,
To return only as the golden dahlia of the morning sun
Lifts its heavy head above the horizon.