Sign Inventory, Week 12

How to Leave the World that Worships should by Ros Barber

Let faxes butter-curl on dusty shelves.
Let junkmail build its castles in the hush
of other people’s halls. Let deadlines burst
and flash like glorious fireworks somewhere else.
As hours go softly by, let others curse
the roads where distant drivers queue like sheep.
Let e-mails fly like panicked, tiny birds.
Let phones, unanswered, ring themselves to sleep.

Above, the sky unrolls its telegram,
immense and wordless, simply understood:
you’ve made your mark like birdtracks in the sand -
now make the air in your lungs your livelihood.
See how each wave arrives at last to heave
itself upon the beach and vanish. Breathe.

Seaside Sonnets

Sign Inventory:

• author uses the beginning stanza as a type of list poem
• writer uses the beginning stanza (as a list poem) in a metaphorical sense
• each metaphorical line in the first stanza seemingly relates/resembles that of an office job, one that is very mundane and lifeless
• in each list, the author also uses the metaphorical elements as scape-routes, providing the reader with various ways to escape
• in the last stanza, the writer no longer needs to provide the reader with advice so the narrator in turn offers a sense of peace, a sense of victory and self-accomplishment
• interestingly enough, the writer's title fits congruently within the discourse of the text without working too overtly alone (as a title sometimes does)
• the writer incorporates an interesting phenonmenon at the end of the poem, a final concluding line standing all alone: "Seaside Sonnets"
• Why/what is the particular implication(s) of this final concluding line to the overall text? How might it offer closure? How might if offer the reader a sense of self-empowerment, or a sense of freedom (in terms of granting the reader with a chance to regulate the ending)?
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