ARB0001's Journal, 31 Dec 16

Great piece of poetry, ARB - well done! 

Nice piece of prose. 

Beautiful 

Oh ARB that is really good, lovely words! I come on here to read peoples posts and i am quite often amazed at some of them, yours is one of them, well done! 🤗 

Thankyou Doobrie, Jocko, Phooka and Bowd, as the title suggests, I was pondering the new year and if anything my resolutions might be to just trust myself more and find out who I am by giving myself more chances to be anything (I believe in evolution of personality - so it is a constant mission to work out who I currently am) - then I thought I really should maybe give myself some more time to write - then I thought ok, lets see whether I have anything to write right now ;-) and this happened. The ideas are not very original but I do think they fit well in this piece. 

Have a great New Year. 

Love this! Happy new year xx 

Wow that is really good! And that is a first attempt? Amazing! I'm going to write that in my notebook 😀 

Thanks Poppycom and Heidi you are most welcome to write it into your notebook. Yes it was a first draft - but I wrote the first 2 lines, then paused and thought about how difficult it can be to be going and getting life (off the side-lines) in difficult times - so then I had the next part of that verse in my mind before writing on. That next part came with 'Take a stand on the sand etc' first, but before I wrote it down I knew it needed the prefacing line above. The next verse pursues the idea of looking around and being thankful but has woven into it the topic of wealth and resources and sufficiency (It would be too long a story to explain why those themes would be in my mind at that point, but they would be) - it again was structured first in my mind and then written - it is a process of pondering and then crystalising those ponderings into actual phrases - but this verse in particular tries to jump from concept to next concept like from object to object with the connecting rhyme very loosely threaded - that's the part I both think worked really well and also am least sure of ('wherever they be' sounds incorrect at first but by the end of the verse it seems to belong?) The last verse is looking down instead of around, and is a new realisation, and is part of a common poetic trick to repeat a section of words from the beginning at the end. (How do we end? As we begin! seemed appropriate for this tide repeats outward and back sort of life) overall at the moment I think its imperfections are the best part of the poem as perhaps that is also true for everything - the imperfections are how we know things are real. I could say that I shifted the pattern in the poem to force the reader to 'stand on the sand as it shifts' but that would be totally untrue - that part is just a lucky coincidence.