Dear Rhina,
I’m very grateful for your generous time and effort with all these poems. I'm just sorry that it became contentious.
I nearly croaked when you pointed out the grammatical error. How could I have missed it? There’s a biblical expression about the scales falling from one’s eyes that seems appropriate here. I’d like to take comfort in the clarity of the semantic sense (thanks, John) but, of course, it won’t do.
These are five of eight stanzas in the original version, which made it clearer that this was a tragedy shared by a group of brothers and sisters at play. That was lost in the cut, which is probably why you were left unsatisfied about the brother. A rewrite of S3 would give me an opportunity to rectify that and cure the grammatical error in one stroke.
I have already rewritten S4 to cure the cloying sentimentality. It has the added advantages of getting rid of the superfluous modifier “little” (what other kind of corpse would a kitten leave?) and giving me a better slant with “corpse” than “home”.
Mama freed the broken corpse
and told us to be brave.
She said there was a better world
beyond the backyard grave.
Thanks also to all my other commentators as well. I will take your remarks into account as I revise.
Bill
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