Hi Jim.
It feels like it wants to be a prose poem but at the last minute line breaks occur.
The perfect description. I, or it, can't seem to make up our minds on this.
I wonder if it might be better effect to shorten the lines.
Something like this?
Behind a chain-link fence and gate
we never once saw open
a songless autumn of grey leaf-light
and old water. Even in summer.
Even in that summer when
whole fields died for want
and the earth cracked like a scab.
Even then it was autumn; damp
and deep enough to drown a child.
That said, your 'prose poem' instinct may well be correct. Will dither.
Welcome to the Sphere!
Thank you.
Hope you like it here.
So far I'd describe it as bracing, but rewarding.
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Hi James.
I think it’s about a child’s trauma over the drowning of another child, which is why it is still autumn. The drowning isn’t just about a child actually drowning, but the feelings of the other child remembering it.
I wouldn't disagree (though see reply to Hilary.)
but I’m not sure about the semicolons.
Me either.
“cracked like a scab” is especially nice because they can be annoyingly painful,
and somehow we seem to forget that as we grow older.
they are sores that are supposedly healing but have reopened, and they are, of course, common for children from playing hard
Precisely.
Good stuff.
Thank you.
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Hi Hilary
There's an overall sense of foreboding and an implication that something horrible - perhaps a literal drowning of a child, perhaps not - happened in this particular place.
The pond/place is real. That a child drowned there (and thus the fence and gate were installed) is, so far as I'm aware, just a local (sub)urban myth.
I'm probably a minority in that I actually like semicolons,
You probably are. But you're right about the intended meaning, so commas it is/will be. Many thanks.
Thanks All.
RG.
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