Thanks for your reactions, Trevor. This poem is meant to work in layers, so it is interesting to hear which ones are working for you and which ones aren't. The title, for instance, alludes to November 1, the Day of the Dead in some Hispanic cultures, when it is typical for people to picnic in graveyards with their dead loved ones. Food and seasonal flowers figure in the celebration. The event being described is a Celebration of Life for the speaker's mother, and it is being held on that day in the form of a picnic in the mother's favorite park, not a graveyard. The description of the calmness and warmth of the day is supposed to allude both to the mother and to the unusually warm day. But I deliberately withhold some of that information at the start, so that it will come together at the end. The conversation of the geese is supposed to mirror the chat of the people. I usually see geese very high in the sky, but the park here is near a river, so the geese have just taken off from it.
I take your point about the "poetic" quality of some of the language. That is partly a side effect of the rhymes, so some of those words are hard to change without drastic changes to the content. I will think about whether that can be done without sacrificing what I think works well about the poem.
Susan
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