Teichman

Catherine Teichman

Professor Christopher Vanderwees

COMM1017

25 November, 2014

From Sea to Sky to Stars

If I took one more step, I’d be walking in the stars.

I’d swim through night and breathe in the dark sky.

I’d run my hands through atmospheric blackness, cup starlight in my palm.

I’d lie like the dead in constellations, soaking up the burning night and relishing in

feeling so small and enormous all at once.

The night is a canvas, painted with a million shades of darkness.

The sand meets the sea in a blurred, dark embrace.

The sea floods into sky, pools blackness into blackness.

The stars pierce the sky, pinpoints of fire in a wide inky night.

I see you in the stars.

I see your eyes in the sparkling light, hear your voice in the smooth silence.

I feel your heartbeat in the little ripples which pulse away from my fingertips.

The cold flowing sky caresses warm against my skin, echoing your feeling fingers’ gentle

touch.

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If you are the night-time sea, I would dream to drown in you.

I pull myself through your silky seashore skin, letting the stinging icy water pour through

my lips to fill my lungs.

Take my breath away and pull me down with beating, tender waves,

And I will embrace that iron tug with arms wide open for you.

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Artist Statement:

This is a poem that I’ve been working on since the summer, and have completed for this

assignment. The image of the blurred sand, sea, and sky on a beach is based off of a trip

that I took to The Pinery Provincial Park in August. We went down to the beaches at 2

am, and the sky was completely clear. I have never seen as many stars as I did that night.

The reflection of the sky in the water below was so clear that, when I walked into the

water, it looked like I could walk right into the sky. The idea of seeing someone in the

stars was inspired by a scene in Romeo and Juliet. In one of Juliet’s monologues, she says

in regards to Romeo, “And when he shall die, take him and cut him out into little stars,

and he will make the face of Heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night.”

This is a monologue that I’d learned and rehearsed for months to prepare for theatre

school auditions, and that line has always been my favourite in the monologue. I love the

idea of taking someone you love and wanting them to be in the stars. After I established

that idea, I just kept expanding on the theme of the dark sky connecting to the dark sea,

and used waves as a motif.

My greatest influences as a poet are William Butler Yeats, Robert Burns, John Keats, and

Lord Byron. Initially, I wrote this poem in a similar way to Byron’s “She Walks in

Beauty”. This is one of my favourite poems, and I really enjoy the way that Byron wrote

it. That is why I initially chose to write this poem as an ABAB. I loved the flow of “She

Walks in Beauty”, and when I first began working on this piece I tried to make it similar

to that. I found that the ABAB format felt very forced, and I preferred to have it less

structured. I was able to express myself much easier in a free-form style poem. I did

choose to have the lines of each stanza get progressively more descriptive. I found that it

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increased the intensity of the images used in the poem. Having the sentence length and

description increase throughout each stanza, and then go back to a shorter, simpler form

for the next stanza, reminded me of the back-and-forth action of the waves on the shore.

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