{"id":4403,"date":"2015-11-04T15:46:52","date_gmt":"2015-11-04T15:46:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/?p=4403"},"modified":"2017-03-10T14:28:04","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T14:28:04","slug":"what-you-left-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/2015\/11\/04\/what-you-left-out\/","title":{"rendered":"What you left out by Laura Scott"},"content":{"rendered":"

What you left out\u00a0\u00a0 by Laura Scott
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first time I heard it, its notes went through me
\nlike milk through water, clouding into my bones
\nso I knew the end before it had even begun.<\/p>\n

I sat and listened as you told me the story of the old man
\nand his three daughters, how he loved them all
\nbut only one of them was good \u2013 the one who asked<\/p>\n

for a rose instead of a dress, who talked of salt
\ninstead of gold, who stood still and said nothing
\nwhile her sisters ran up and down flights of words.<\/p>\n

And as the story drew itself around me, I saw her
\nsitting at a table, dragging her nail across the yolk,
\nrucking its film up into creases until it split<\/p>\n

and the yellow pumped out into the white: that’s when
\nit all went wrong, the beast threw back his head
\nand roared until the leaves shook on the trees,<\/p>\n

the meat wouldn’t cure and the fish started to rot
\nas soon as they left the sea, the kingdom split
\ninto a thousand pieces and blew back into the old man’s eyes<\/p>\n

like sand. And I waited for you to tell me about the mother \u2013
\nhow she loved this daughter best of all, how she stroked her hair
\nwhen she carried her back to the house at the end of the day.<\/p>\n

(What I Saw<\/em>, page 22)<\/p>\n

I’ve been pre-occupied recently with the gap between my experience of poetry and what I perceive (partly through the unwillingness of readers to buy poetry) to be most people’s experience of it. I think of poetry as the most important art form we have. It contains sound (the voice, its rhythms, music), & thought (ideas, opinions, imaginings) & vision (pictures, images, conjurations). And poetry mixes sound, thought and vision into story-telling, that most fundamental use of language, the basis of so much discourse (‘how was your school\/work\/lover today, darling?’). I’ve been reading and re-reading this poem wondering how I can communicate my joy in it to someone who ‘doesn’t get on with’ poetry.<\/p>\n

Michael Mackmin<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been pre-occupied recently with the gap between my experience of poetry and what I perceive (partly through the unwillingness of readers to buy poetry) to be most people\u2019s experience of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3508,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4403"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6112,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4403\/revisions\/6112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}