Karma

[create_destiny]

My sister’s beeswax hair is everywhere now
it bounces and sings
in the spun color of memory
on the lemonade bedspread
a blur of dandelion crowns
and butterfly bonnets

It twirls and curls
on the sun-soaked porch
in the cream corn linen
in the isotopes of hope cake
where tiger-lily tabbies make biscuits
     til the spontaneous day breaks

It dances with fairies in the saffron wind
in the clatter of white rain
in the sleepy spoon swimming pool
in the harmony of yew wood
under the West Main Street sycamore trees
and helicopter promise seeds
     glittering in the sun

Comments

[1gr8poetess.livejournal.com]

Ask yourself why the first stanza is different. Maybe it needs to be. If you feel there are rythym problems, scan and speak the poem and tweak it until you feel better about it. Or make the most of the differences in rythym--use them as additional information to your readers. There need be no template for your work. Try changing what the poem looks like--put all the stanzas together, put it in a proselike paragraph, separate each line or each word into its own line. Form is what you make it.

Poetry is communication, albeit in a very stylized, pure form. All you have to worry about, really, is whether you're communicating what you intend to communicate (is it an emotion, a narrative, an image? Is it all three, is it none of the above? These questions will lead you forward when you are stuck). If you are communicating, the rest is just for fun, so play with it. And remember, especially during the first few years of its life, a poem cannot live up (in its writer's mind) to the ideas that inspired it. Read this same version of your poem in 2 years when it is long-forgotten and you will sob at its impact. In the meantime, keep writing for yourself, to communicate those nearly incommunicable ideas and thoughts and images in your mind. The more you write, the better you get, the more internalized the processes of writing and revising become.

[createdestiny.livejournal.com]

Yes, thank you! I'll keep working on it.