[Hilary Biehl]

I like this, too. The imagery is visceral and the language is stark and compelling. I really love the dry earth cracking like a scab. 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.

I'm probably a minority in that I actually like semicolons, but the first one in this poem seems especially out of place to me. If you're saying that the songless autumn is behind the chain-link fence, then I think a comma would work better. The second one could also be replaced with a comma.