Antithesis 56 — Summary

Jim LeftwichContemplative

are death we awe

hard to be a true turning of the wind inside-out

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Don't expect a tidy story here. The poem works in fragments, and the first line is already slippery: "are death we / awe." Read it as broken syntax and you can hear several things at once. Death is something we are, or something we stand in awe of, and the word "awe" sits alone on its line as if the speaker is stunned into stopping.

The next lines sound like effort: "hard to be / a true turning / of the wind / inside-out." Being honest, or being genuinely changed, seems difficult, and the image the poem reaches for is strange and physical. A wind turned inside-out can't quite be pictured, which seems to be the point. It suggests a reversal so complete that ordinary language and logic don't hold.

The mood is hushed, unsettled, and a little awed. The speaker doesn't explain a feeling so much as let it break through the grammar. The title, "Antithesis 56," hints at opposites, and the poem does hold death and awe, hardness and turning, inside and out, in tension. I'm reading that from the text, not from anything outside it.

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