How do I say
How do I say what I feel.
The hard and soft sound
From tongue to lips forming
The ministry of worship
Secular sentiment steeped
In the sweet breath
Of dreams and dreamers.
In the night, we expose
our underbelly,
Begging to be scratched,
Surrendering to the touch,
We confess faults contained
Behind a curtain of champagne.
The chit chit of fear
Of losing you and
Facing the sudden ouster
from this safe sublime embrace.
The divvying up of plates and silver
Between family who become
vultures scrapping over nightclothes
In the chamber of Ebenezer.
You are no miser
Though you hide your riches
You deep in your heart.
These are my confessions.
They tumble like River rocks
Until smooth and round and bare ,
Lying just below the surface
That, like the veil of the confessional,
Masks the true shape and size of them.
Alyse Sammarco
June 1, 2021
10 thoughts on "How do I say"
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good images, great sounds and internal rhyming, nice poem
Thank you. I’ve been working with River and water imagery.
I especially like your comparison of confessions to tumbling river rocks in the last stanza. Nice!
Thank you. Religious imagery can be tricky as it’s loaded to start with.
“the sweet breath
of dreams and dreamers” +++
Also adored the river rock imagery in the last stanza!
Thank you. Something about the wearing down in the tumbling. Makes it all less sharp.
Favorite stanza:
These are my confessions.
They tumble like River rocks
Until smooth and round and bare ,
Lying just below the surface
That, like the veil of the confessional,
Masks the true shape and size of them.
Thank you. I wanted to express how things even confessions are not what they appear. They never are even when we try to confess.
The religious imagery works for you here, and I really appreciate your pairings of words… “Secular sentiment steeped:
Like the imagery and mystery