Trina Layne Poet Free verse

Notes About The Poem

Quote by Mark Z. Danielewski: “Aside from recurrence, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference, echoes also reveal emptiness. Since objects always impede acoustic reflection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity.” 

 

2nd in The Echo Returns Not Contest (Sponsor: Unseeking Seeker)

Judged: March 23rd, 2025

 

The Echo Returns Not

	I sailed an olive boat 
into the center of the sea 
alone
	to find a cure for my loose heart 
not the spring-back type, noble with elasticity 
but leap-forward lecher-wild
binding to any skirted frame and drooping hemline 
like friendly burrs in shrubbery lanes
	sat in an olive boat
drifting mid-seas 
unaccompanied but for Hope to land a cure upon my knees
to heal my lousy, narcissistic zeal
	an insatiable human thinks like a possessed apiary
an overwrought dam
	I tonsured my beatific locks 
as bare as Samson 
hoodwinked 
by his pet Flytrap
	tossed reflective surfaces, anything that would give my face
a way to self-seduction
    safe in a roasted green-pea float 
lost like dead at sea 
to recover a voice that scarcely has been mine
	its echo returns not
through bursting towns 
busy at trade
    hawkers cawing,
    hucksters' crow delirious, 
    chattering cashboxes
    traffic snakes wending 
    Nowhere do they end in time
always metal and rust
    ferric towering towers, condominium pride, 
    noisome domiciles, toxic steel cages
    barring the success of this voice~
the sound of your mind drowned inside the urban brawl
not a jot of space to reckon nor conciliate 
blushing-rushing-golden consciences 
	an echo may not return to its sender then ~
a man with no name.

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Len Gasun March 8, 2025 at 7:15 PM Wow! This is so creative and superb write my dear Trina. I enjoyed reading this and a great contender in the contest. Thank you so much for sharing your amazing talent in poetry. God bless you always. Keep writing. Hugs Trina Layne March 9, 2025 at 4:43 AM Appreciated Len!