Voice Practice
An adaptation of "Conversation Among the Ruins," by Sylvia Plath, which poem I once read aloud, several times each day for several days, while practicing my voice.
a harsher flight how the entrance settles
as ash on a tongue drier than mine:
all 'throughs' are weirder, now, in the new
order of ruins and fallen lights and
untasteable turns of the frames we sat beneath,
bleak as the miles still to cover (rise,
terminal, rise) from shellac's, the hell of sensory's,
record setting crash through the wall
of our home – to home, at last – while storms
take off low, hacking bitter light down
the forbidden estates of this neck, whispering –
this is not a safe place for us to speak –
of tunnels, fissures in the crust, ways to get back
that kingdom behind the eye, whence
our high, magic ceremony of lashes, that rending slip
to once more draw the havoc forth