Avid Deacon says doesn’t really know for sure when poetry first touched him, but it could have been in grade nine. He remembers starting to read the romantic poets: Byron, Shelly, Keats, Wordsworth. A year later, he heard a Dylan Thomas recording of Under Milk Wood and a bunch of his poetry. He was transfixed.
This Welshman touched a nerve in him. He never thought of poetry in the same way again and loved it as spoken word not just verse in print. This Dylan Thomas moment was very similar to his first exposure to the blues. Dylan used words that felt like, if you couldn’t speak English, his ideas would still felt, because the sound of the words he chose were so pure they were like the thought. Years later David wrote this tribute:
Thirty Years to Heaven
When he was thirty
Dylan Thomas strode Welsh hills trumpeting his
age and grandeur as if he were eighty.
His rumpled shagginess, stalking
the high side with the wind.
And damp with sea mist
and mind scowling at words
that wouldn’t shout blue, grey and cobblestone sounds
to the churches and streams and woods of his youth.
And in the clapping forest,
his song, high and unheard
in the tunneling rock below
where the fathers of his melody
hammered the same rhythm.
And he, in the beam
above the shaft
drinking from their wooden cup
the milk of immortality.
Take your time and enjoy some of David Deacon’s Poetry. Return often to see which of David’s poems he is currently sharing with the world…
Melody
Jazz like life
has a lot to do with
the notes that aren’t played,
just heard.
And sometimes
there is room in their silence
for a flight of melody
so pure, it makes the rest
of life taste ordinary.
Unrequited love
Evaporation
I am sitting here with the echo of these past years
and you here now like a stone skipping
across time: Just the light illusion
of something. Like water:
Water as light as the shimmer of the sun
on hot pavement. Water or time:
Both evaporate to reassemble in another place.
I wonder about the evaporation of us,
reassembling again and again
each time the risk to fall or pass
and evaporation so inevitable in the
shimmer of the sun.
Candace
Standing passive
to the light of the green sea
in her green eyes
in a roomful of notice,
waitressing her hair
to a pantomime of innocence
falling against skin, lightly
from the shoulder, softening
her shape to the luxury
of knowledge, carnal like gold,
sharing with one, as yet unnamed,
the purest moment of taste
before she encounters
the wooden nickel of another temptation.
David is always adding more of his poetry. Check back often…
