On the Way Back

I wrote this about when some of my family and I went fishing and my brothers had...let's just call it way too much fun...comment, critique, and enjoy!!!

On the Way Back


My brothers jump the waves on our boat,

making me and my nephew Carlos laugh. A wave comes over,

soaking me and Carlos with ocean. My brother in law

hands me his navy-blue sweater, which

Carlos and I each put an arm in.

He lays his head on my lap, and soon

his small body

stills,

all the life which had been in him only moments ago

leaving him for the moment. I stroke

his hair, spiky, springing as

my hand passes over it, light as

the sun on a bright day.

The fish we’ve caught fight restlessly in their bucket,

knowing their time is coming,

knowing my brother will not be kind and merciful.

But as for that moment,

I will always remember

that five year old boy,

who laid his head on his aunt’s lap,

who slept until the motor of the boat stopped,

who stuck his fingers in the fish’s mouth

so fearlessly for the group shot that followed.

This was kind of cute, I suppose. Really the only thing I can comment on [plus, tonight all my critiques seem overly useless, sorry!] is that this is very prose like. What separate this from prose? In other words, what makes this a poem other than the fact that it is in verse?

Bring in more imagery, more sensory words. What does the fish smell like? Is the water splashing your face?

Also, I couldn't get much emotion out of it. What is the narrator feeling? Try to make me feel with her.

It's very simple, but I think it's pretty good.

In the beginning, you keep saying Carlos, and then you suddenly remember there's such a thing as pronouns. You should mix the actual name and pronouns up better.

The story's good. But at the end it tries to be touching, and I, like Claudette, don't get much emotion out of it. You should work on that part, to make our readers feel that sense of pride, contentment, comfort ect.

I think writing a short non-fiction story about this or some other family experience would be a good choice for you.

Some more details would be nice, as Clau said; part of the appeal of this is that it's simple and straightforward, but you can still include detail and emotion without getting 'flowery' or overly complex. Writing this as prose might help, even if you want to revisit it as poetry -- it will give you room to develop the scene, really describe everything and get a sense of conveying the characters on the page. And then you can condense that down to important images, back into a poem.