Thanks for your most helpful and thoughtful input, Matt! (And I’m glad to be back, the feedback is so worthwhile.) First I’m very happy that you liked the original first line. I actually thought it was a stronger beginning exactly as you said, but am always ready to revise and reconsider. I know its lack of regularity is dissonant with the overall rhythm, but hoped that would jive with the rest of it somehow.
Also thanks for your suggestion about fingertips and bones, which I took; very receptive and it inspired some other changes as you can see. I prefer “drones” as a verb where it picks up on the “bones” new more effective placement, and the foghorn was more confusing perhaps (and I actually used “foghorn blue” in another poem so wanted to change it). “Blue” as a noun could be many things but for me adds a note of sorrow. I changed the last line to see if it works, and hope the change to the penultimate line echoes the earlier harp to give it a sort of coherence without saying “finally.”
Re S3, for me it reminds me of my parents and of an era where mornings began with radio - with commercials and occasional static between songs, although I didn’t say that. It’s only a ghost of a suggestion. Maybe it doesn’t matter who Walter Cronkite is, he’s a specific man who bid us farewell. Half the people famous in this hour will be forgotten some years down the road, and the value of a year shrinks with age, but is that really a shrinking or is it an approach to a more timeless state, “floating on a sound?” And “Sound” is also a name for a body of water as in “Puget Sound” we could see from our house when I was a child in Seattle. So for me it has that sense too. Maybe I should put a footnote lol. Hope the revision is an actual improvement, but I’m open to all suggestions.
Thanks again,
Siham
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