Jan, I’m hoving in a bit late here to tell you how much I admire your latest revision. You’ve made a lot of astute edits, and your no-holds-barred language comes through now more cleanly than ever. It has something of the primal grandeur of some passage from the Old Testament. And I’m still in admiration of your mastery of narrative flow and sustained tone (though I have some reservations, as per below, about your new ending segment).
I’m especially fond of these wildly imaginative, visceral phrases:
“sudden oceans teethed with spite”
“the assonance of zephyrs slowly rustling leaves awake”
However, I do start wondering starting at “the dandelion fairies” about why you seem to shift into speaking of mild breezes rather than wild winds, and into a passive tense and then a list format. The tone of “micro shimmers” struck me as especially out of step from what’s preceded with its sudden startlement of scientific language.
I see that you’ve explained that you’re no slave to grammatical conventions, but you also said that sometimes you just overlook details, so hesitantly I mention all of the following. Did you intend to have a period at the end of L2, and to have the first word of L5 capitalized? Also, in L11, I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean to have an apostrophe in “it’s,” since you’re using it as a possessive noun, not a contraction of “it is.” (Otherwise, this line in its revised form goes down more easily now that it’s not rendered as a statement unto itself.) A comma after L13 would be standard. And I read your comment about pronouncing “cures” as two syllables, but that threw me off, too. In “attacking growth, and given time, it warps,” it seems like you don’t really mean the “and” in there and that it’s there only for the meter. Your initial version of this line, in contrast, was clear.
I think this poem would be much stronger without your new, standalone last line. You’ve already amply conveyed what it says, and much more powerfully. Although I’m not sure about the downshift to breezes that the last three lines in the body of the poem reflect, these lines do feel like the climax of the poem and it seems a shame to take away from the force they (or something like them could) create by adding anything else. They’ve got the elemental power of a folk riddle.
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