Stephen Donner's Weblog

Paula Deanda has got the hook, yo. ;-)

School is, as expected, still busy, or, should I say, getting busier now.

Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

I've finished reading T. S. Elliot's The Wasteland and Other Poems, as well as Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time.

Been reading from Arthurian Romances, a collection of works by Chretien de Troyes and also been reading some Bedier (Simon Montagu and Daniel Glazman might be familar with these).

This week is Lancelot (although the online version I've pointed to here seems much shorter than the one which appears in Arthurian Romances), last week's reading was Cliges, and the week prior was Tristan and Iseult.

Interesting stuff, though a bit long-winded in parts.

Inroads

(I figured I should edit this post and explain a little bit of the driving force behind writing this poem.)

I grew up in both Swaziland (Mbabane) and South Africa (Pinetown). While a youth in Swaziland, I came upon a dead (or dying) horse on the side of the dusty road. Needless to say, it was a jarring experience for one so young--but for one of any age, naturally--and so here I tried to capture the mindset behind what I conjecture must've been a hit and run.

Inroads

Alone, on the side of the road, I saw
You: eyes still open, but probably not noticing
The flies that covered the rest of your face, nor
The blood that encrusted your parched skin
Silently begging for water

The once saliva-drenched bridle
As dry as the gully of
Your master's heart, wherever he may be

But he is not here, conspicuously absent
And so it falls to me to witness
This charade that is all too real

You realize the pallor of my face is from
The smell of your massive carcass
Derived of a semblance of life

Under the unrepenting steel clouds
Someone drives away with an iron-rich fender
Telling themselves that it is you
Who should've known better;
These roads are for man, not beast

School's started, and--in typical liberal arts college fashion--is absolutely insane.

The required reading volume is simply staggering, but, unlike last semester, at least I don't have huge amounts of writing to do.

Still, eight _novels_ for one class (I have FOUR) is a "bit" much: ahem. Thank goodness Spark Notes exists.

What I keep trying to remind myself of this semester is that indeed _this_ one is the last; the penultimate semester seemed un-traversable, but I made it through that one relatively unscathed too.

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