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The Quick and the Dead
It was so quick. The kitten frisked;
with one ungainly bound
she struck the spokes of my brother's bike
as they went spinning 'round.
Her tiny body in the wheel
made a tuneless strum
and a tawny circlet around the hub.
We kids stood stricken dumb.
As eldest, every eye was turned
toward me. A splat of red
on the sidewalk broke into my trance.
"Get Mom. The kitten's dead."
She freed the broken little corpse
and told us to be brave.
We prayed there would be a happy home
beyond the backyard grave.
That night, she tucked us kids in bed
and played Ave Maria.
I thought about the quick and the dead
and Daddy in Korea.
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[center]<table bgcolor=white cellpadding=25 border=0><tr><td>The poems I've been privileged to read for this project suggest that narrative poety is alive and well, and that it's being done in different ways in various parts of the English-speaking world: that's great news. This one, anchored to recent American by the last line, tells a homely story clearly grounded in memory. It's painfully visual--impossible to read that second stanza without wincing--and widens out beyond the domestic only in the last stanza.
A few questions: in line 9, does that misplaced modifier ("every eye" is defined mistakenly as the "eldest") create unintentional humor for everyone else, as it does for me? I would get that out right away. And does stanza 4 strike everyone as hovering dangerously on the brink of sentimentality? I know what the poet is after, and it belongs in the poem, but maybe it could be more lightly done.
And the thing that troubles me most is this: why is the speaker in the poem at all, when it was the brother's bike that did the damage? The "turned to me" in stanza 3 feels extraneous, because it's the brother I want to hear about, his response, the grief and guilt I can imagine--but he's dropped right away. This appealing and moving poem could be even stronger, with a change in the cast of characters, and maybe in the diction of stanza 4.
~Rhina
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