MERIDIAN

And with a shout
Dead man ! doctor let me finish.
death is not my country
my history is beautiful,
a year of iron,
keen of location , points and facing ways

A rush
A rough of starker earth
Nature daft in forest burst
cursed green
strangle oak

What's to discuss?

:)

Jx

i hoped for a critique of what i meant by the words
it was inspired by my time ill in an ICU

Well, personally, I would never have divined that from the poem. I am intrigued by the odd line, 'Nature daft in forest burst'? reads like a typo.

I was in hospital last year and had rather hoped that being on self-administered morphine for 48 hours would have perked up my poetry...but it just made me chuck up and talk gibberish. Ah, well.

'A year of iron' = iron lung? I like the use of the elements to describe time, there's a fab song with the line 'I've been having a salt year' which, I think alludes to a year of emotional drought, but with plenty tears and left a bad taste...not sure what your 'iron year' meant? Although the line after could allude to compasses and direction? Who knows?

Only you I suspect.

: )

thanks
the year of iron is how i felt not giving up i had something to hold on to with the directions

meridian is quite self explanatary in content compared to some of my later work 8-)

When sentences are incomplete, or a collection of phrases, it suggests we look outside the text for coherence. The context implied here is of illness, emergency, a hospital. The speaker addresses a doctor and denies he is dead. (echoes of the 7/7 bombings).
Incoherence is understandable, a struggle to communicate. ‘Doctor let me finish’ The patient wants to be heard out. (or to end?) Is it a request for more time? It introduces a theme of time, and time limits. ‘My history is beautiful’ is also coherent. This links the theme of time, the patients life, with an eternal quality. This time and beauty theme conflicts with the strain of sudden violence that runs throughout: ‘shout’ ‘let me’ ‘rush’ ‘rough’ ‘starker’ ‘burst’ ‘cursed’ ‘strangle’ convey the struggle, and link to the theme of death.
The title ‘Meridian’, linking with ‘country’, ‘location’, ‘points’ and ‘facing ways’ suggests attempts to resolve location in place, as the ‘time’ theme is searching for location in time: ‘my history’, ‘year’, but in the second stanza time and place focus in close up detail; the nature, country, theme becomes ‘earth’, ‘forest’, ‘green’ ‘oak’. These are combined with the violent, sudden terms suggesting flash back images. What can we make of ‘daft’? It suggests bewilderment. As a phrase it echoes ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’. The phrase ‘strangle oak’ suggests hanging, or perhaps it is the oak being strangles, nature itself being attacked?
This is the difficulty of reducing the clues that grammar gives as to what meaning is intended. Completely opposite meanings can be discovered. I have the impression this was a difficult poem to write, Mark, and perhaps hard to revisit. It is so condensed that it might repay unpacking some of the phrases, to tease out your own meanings more clearly.