In a time before
Life lived here
Birds and flowers
trees and fish
Then the waste flowed in
Excess from the humans
Once clear ponds and streams
now a muddled brown
Debris scattered
floating
The grass is long since dead
unable to sustain
to grow
A dark cloud has descended
On the formerly wondrous place
Nothing lives here now
Except death
It's black shadow
consuming all.
Hello Jessi,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this with us :). I like your choice in stanza structure—there’s a balanced visual pattern that occurs; the first, third and sixth stanzas feature four lines, the second and fifth contain two, and a single stanza of three lines is housed somewhere in the middle. The title refers to the concept of memory which is often unstable and occasionally imbalanced, so the poem’s strong sense of structure gives it an interesting foundation.
The beginning of the poem is introduced by a nostalgic speaker who displays a knack for narrative story-telling. The descriptions that follow include wild life, plant life, but also the deterioration present due to human interference. I appreciate the attention to certain aspects of punctuation, like choosing to capitalize only specific words at the beginning of certain lines. Your speaker has a conversational rhythm that explores the narrative events occurring in the poem: “Then the waste flowed in Excess from the humans” (5-6). The narrated events are set at a gradual pace, one that allows the reader to spend an adequate amount of time in each stanza.
Something I’ve noticed to be present in all of our poems, is the onset of time and the consideration of a diachronic span of events. We all consider the concept of time and its passing in our responses to this prompt, and I see it occurring in your poem in the fourth stanza and onward:
The grass is long since dead
unable to sustain
to grow (11-13).
I like the descriptions in the last few stanzas. Although the information that concludes the poem ends on a difficult note, the last stanza gives the poem an encompassed sense of quiet, with moments for the reader to reflect.
I look forward to our next class, keep writing! :)
-Tara