If a Tree Falls...

• Artist: Astaire
• Description: I mostly write in free verse, so this piece doesn't have a set meter or rhyme scheme. The title is supposed to be reminiscent of the age-old question, "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?"
• Date: 07/15/2008
• Tags: tree forest suicide

We stood around her corpse:
little scientists, pretending
she was our latest experiment.
We measured her trajectory
from ledge to concrete, had numbers
to freeze her last moments in;
we took pictures, and outlined her body
in chalk.

She was our immortal question now.
She could not escape our pages and frames.

Did she scream?
Did she crack like a blood-filled egg
knocked accidentally out of the fridge
when someone reached for the milk?
Could we have heard her
if we listened hard enough?

Her body never said a word.
Broken, it traveled through the night:
sirens blaring above, tires screeching below.

All we can guess is that her mind was a forest,
and no one was there to hear her make a sound.

Comments

[Astaire]

Thank you very much! heart

[Kira has no value]

Although I'm not a fan of the rhetoric in poetry, Astaire, I did like it.


And, as obviousness intends, I liked the last two lines.

I miss minilurve. Why'd they have to make an Arena? D':

[Bella Ayomide]

My favorite lines:

She was our immortal question now.

All we can guess is that her mind was a forest,
and no one was there to hear her make a sound.

I love how it's neither clinical nor unfeeling regaurding her death. You've struck a nice balance, especially as you're dealing with suicide.

[Nari of Nowhere]

i really like this. i like that you still have some kind of poetic structure to your free verse, it doesn't just look like someone put extra spaces between random sentences in a paragraph. i really really love it. ^^

[Astaire]

@Casca- Yeah, I realized I misspoke after I posted. I MEANT to say that she fell BOTH in her mind and in real life, but it didn't come out that way.

@ nevertobeokay - Yes, I did. I'm waiting for a response. *Crosses fingers*

@ Zero - We don't have to agree with each other's work to know that we possess talent.

[Zero is an Integer]

I don't always agree with your work, Astaire, but I'll be damned if this gets outranked by someone's horrible arm-cutting bullshit. Back to the top for you. *kicks poem*

[TheVoiceOfCreation]

I knew I was gonna love this before I even read it... I was right. <3



By the way, did you ever send anything in? stare