[R. Nemo Hill]

My poem Dead Lake appears here (at the top) at New Verse News (this morning).

Nemo

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

All that made a here of there.

Do you say beautiful work of such a thing as this about such a thing as this? I don't know but there it is. Beautiful-terrible.

[Michael Cantor]

Beautiful! (I wrote that before noticing Andrew's similar comment.) This one is something special.

[Gail White]

A great one, Nemo.

[Siham Karami]

Truly unforgettable. One of the great elegies for one of the greatest tragedies.

[Gregory Palmerino]

Moving, Nemo. Take all the words of this poem and heed them well.


Cheers,
Greg

[R. Nemo Hill]

Thanks, Andrew, Michael, Gail, Siham, Gregory. This was a new kind of writing for me, and I found it very difficult: responding to current event, a sort of 'occasional poetry' I guess.

I actually thought of dedicating it to you, Andrew, but I knew the site would play with the formatting a bit, so I didn't want it to be too fastidiously designed as is my habit. The epigraph I had intended (along with a link to the story) was a quote from the article (as are the closing lines of each stanza):

“The lake had always been what mattered, not the ground.”

Nemo

[Matt Q]

Nemo, it's a sad and beautiful poem. I had not heard about this.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Thanks, Matt. I just causally ran across the article in the Times one morning, and it instantly hit a chord with me, reminding me of a book I read many years ago, The Songs of Salanda by H. Arlo Nimmo, about "the Bajau, a small group of nomadic boat-dwellers who plied the waters off the southernmost Philippine islands in small single-family houseboats...by the 1970's the Bajau way of life had largely disappeared, an indirect casualty of the Marcos regime's war against the Muslims of Sulu. Nimmo's testimony about his experience of the archipelago is thus an ethnographic treasure." The book is written as fiction, a series of stories, so it was really compelling reading, empathetic in a way that perhaps a dry anthropological report might not have been. It filled me with such melancholy for that which is human and passes away. In that case the agent was political, not environmental, but ignoring all polemic, the emotion of loss was the same as that I felt when I read of the plight of these "lake people".

Nemo

[Ann Drysdale]

So many things we overlook, newswise, in our concern for our immediate situation. Thank you, Nemo, for casting your net into this grief and finding the dark pearls in it. Bless you for setting them simply in this sad talisman.