To and Fro in the Void of Reality

Ashes
blowing in loose swirls
Blackened, charred and limbless.
Bleak incandescent orange
Sagging hands
of blind wire

The flame-
don't let it go out.
We're carrying the fire.
We're the good guys.

A trellis of a dog
straw hat, cob pipe,
rowboat-
nothing at all,
violence to its origins.

In the cave
the child led him
through the waking world
of the night.

The man,
the boy
wandered in the cold wake
trailing his hand.
Horror, creatures.
Please,
just be a dream.

This was my found poem for The Road. As much as I'd like to say I wrote this poem, all the words and phrases come from McCarthy. I actually enjoyed this exercise since I do like to write poems once in a while. I find poetry to be like a form of art- words don't have to strictly follow their definitions and the tight boundaries of sentence structure can be ignored. Speaking of art, The Road has actually had an influence on one of my paintings for my art class. I am juxtaposing the image of a colorful "Tree of Life" with the dark, post-apocalyptic world found in the novel to bring up the issue of environmental awareness.

As for this poem, my two topics are dreams/flashbacks and ash and fire imagery. The beginning of the poem sets up the "void of reality" the man and the boy must face every day. However, the man is also stuck in the past. His dreams are always filled with his memories- ones he hopes to dispose of because he doesn't want to have "good" dreams. To him, having good dreams means to give up. My title for the poem highlights the man's path as he drifts between past and present.