the tragedy of the leaves
I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,
the potted plants yellow as corn;
my woman was gone
and the empty bottles like bled corpses
surrounded me with their uselessness;
the sun was still good, though,
and my landlady's note cracked in fine and
undemanding yellowness; what was needed now
was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester
with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd
because it exists, nothing more;
I shaved carefully with an old razor
the man who had once been young and
said to have genius; but
that's the tragedy of the leaves,
the dead ferns, the dead plants;
and I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world had failed us
both.
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Submitted by EdCan71 on May 10, 2015
Modified on April 15, 2023
- 42 sec read
- 352 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABCDDEFGHIJHFKLMNOPQRSTUV |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 778 |
Words | 139 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 25 |
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"the tragedy of the leaves" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 22 Nov. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/43916/the-tragedy-of-the-leaves>.
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