Dragon - How everything shines in the morning light

Life is simple.. 

Act poor,

Act broke. 

Have more than you show and

Speak less than you know. 

Trust me, it'll save you from

How everything shines in the morning light

Breakage

BY MARY OLIVER

I go down to the edge of the sea. 

How everything shines in the morning light! 

The cusp of the whelk, 

the broken cupboard of the clam, 

the opened, blue mussels, 

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred— 

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split, 

dropped by the seagulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone. 

It's like a schoolhouse 

of little words, 

thousands of words. 

First you figure out what each one means by itself, 

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop 

       full of moonlight. 

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Beautiful Ataneta Swainson is dead. 
I had a crush on her when she was a prefect 
(hers is the face that swims into my head 
when Katherine Mansfield's Maata is mentioned)

Poem of the week: Dragon Talk by Fleur Adcock

It's the title sequence from Fleur Adcock's most recent collection, Dragon Talk, and the "Dragon" persona derives from the program's full title: "Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software".

The icon that originally appeared on the desktop, Adcock tells me, was actually a small red dragon's head. (It's since been replaced by a less appealing green flame). 

Powerful beasts, even mythical ones, have always attracted advertising (and branding) agencies. The recycling process hinted at here is fascinating: old myth into brand-name, brand-name into new myth, enabling the poet to give a digital "airy nothing" bodily and symbolic presence.

The poem begins at the beginning, almost in "once-upon-a-time" fashion, with a friendly nudge to the Dragon, as if inviting reminiscences. 

It recalls the choice of Alice in Wonderland as the training text – because, Adcock says, "it seemed to me that the mythological creatures in that book would feel at home with a Dragon as part of their crew."

With no fiery breath of its own, and only metaphorical claws and wings, the virtual dragon proves a little slow-witted. 

"If you pause between individual words the Dragon is less likely to understand them," Adcock says. 

"It works by context – or at least that's the theory." In the poem, the Dragon's difficulties with its imaginative context are comically and engagingly drawn. Its mistakes can clearly be infuriating but its docility, though merely that of the machine, arouses the poet's, and the reader's, sympathy.

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