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Beachcombing Only two hundred yards, crunching with sand, would stand between our home and terrors you’d hidden in a cave of years. That day’s sun lumbered above unsummery clouds. Stands of irises first snatched your thoughts away, then sand tuned them to the pulsing shore, wedged in toes splayed to tease the depths that grain the damp. Off beyond the parking lot some winds had edged with twisting trees to hint ‘return’, we stood still: one dead trunk leaned tombstone-quietly— shedding bark just like a snake, its dermis strips like rotting arrows—to what was just horizon, catalogue-typical yet bloated, yolked with lichen, mossy ochres, olive greens. And when the silent spinifex’s dark bush paths sprouted unexpectedly a man’s walking stick—with man attached—your fatal mind mated him with ‘Murderer’, and you fled. What ghost inscribing his dead branch smashed your peace? His family walked with him and they understood him with mine, he was undermined. Two hundred yards more separated you from childhood’s visions again: that man only punctuated your day, but ruined mine completely. |
Additional Notes:
Apparently I wrote this two years ago. I just found it today when sifting through my old bits and pieces. The really weird thing is that while I remember the occasion it describes, I can't for the life of me remember writing it.
This Poem was Critiqued By: James C. Horak On Date: 2009-10-23 12:41:35
Critiquer Rating During Critique: 10.00000
I have always told you, Mark, you have the gift. It's well demonstrated here in you natural ability
with poetic language, virtually a genius for the euphemism. Were you and the other gifted Mark not
subject of wavering into moods this could become a constant ability for both of you. Perhaps it's
because you may think, both of you, you've not been "blessed" with enough English Lit courses or
paraded over by academics (sterile in academia,) but NOT SO.
I've been both and all it's done for me is to have given me a false sense of accomplishment.
Look at all these literary journals and compare their proud offerings with our own...we've nothing
to turn our heads down about.
This poem is full of poetic meat. Rewrite it utilizing the magical poetic indistinctness you've acquired
of late, to elevate it more beyond prose.
JCH