6th June 1944

An entrance to the beach,
through the back door of a truck
Designed for land and water
Lined up by its fellow machinery

Soldiers first greeting from new lands,
a plunge followed by a wade
Dragged under by a bergen and
the steel of a weapon

All this trapdoored by a billow
of cloud
Or perhpas the smoke of an explosion
And barely visible to the eyes of the men
A cliff face, shaded by the ominous cover for this all

Hi Ferris--

Where is the punctuation?! Hehe, you really need some...and here's why:

An entrance to the beach,
through the back door of a truck
Designed for land and water
Lined up by its fellow machinery

When this is read there is an instant pause after "truck" in L2 for whatever reason...there just is. However, there is no punctuation mark there to warrant this pause and the following line is capitalized (and this one isn't, which is the only thing sticking out to say 'hey I'm a new sentence!'). But, if you put a period at the end of L2 it doesn't make sense with the rest of the stanza. The flow is also completely different between L1-2 and L3-4.

Soldiers first greeting from new lands,
a plunge followed by a wade
Dragged under by a bergen and
the steel of a weapon

Again you have one piece of punctuation here and that erie invisible pause after L6.

All this trapdoored by a billow
of cloud
Or perhpas the smoke of an explosion
And barely visible to the eyes of the men
A cliff face, shaded by the ominous cover for this all

Why is this stanza five lines instead of four? "of cloud" certainly does not warrant it's own line...add it onto the first one. Also I think you meant "perhaps". And add some punctuation! There is consistently a pause at the end of the second line in all stanzas.

The last line didn't really do it for me. It's too.......omniscient. It's just floating and doesn't really sun anything up. I think there needs to be a bit more information in the stanzas because right now they are really just images. But I would definitely read it aloud first and see the flaws--or have someone else read it aloud to you--before doing anything.

Good luck!

OK I agree with what you are saying about punctuation and agree it needs to be revised.

However you said it is just a lot of images. It is an instimatic poem, meaning it captures and instant and is based on a picture. Thus through the picture I wrote this on, no emotion was conveyed, I couldn't say what would happen next. It is only one moment.

Thank you for the feedback though