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125,008 Literary Works • 672,814 Reviews
I would review this....if I saw something...
While I can see exactly what you were trying to do, with the idea of "roots up of wild onions" that imagery is kind of hard to follow for me. I'm highly familiar with gardens, and all the work that goes into growing and cultivating onions, garlic, and other bulb plants, and perhaps I'm confusing my garlic with my onion, but I don't think I am. When they come out of the ground, they aren't really that flaky in my memory. They're smooth and supple like a rich ball. The drying process, and curing process then makes the product we are mostly used to. For me, this makes an inconsistency with "papered skin" as well as changing over to "leets" which seem like "leeks" which also goes in that category.
Still, I love how you have "union" instead of "onion" that is a very clever play on words "onion-governed grass" which would actually look really pretty. We had a patch of onions that grew up together and they were very grassy with their hollow tube grass that was stringy and frail. The garlic actually flips over in a pig-curl whereas leeks are completely straight and firm.
My idea of onions is reflected, somewhat, in "To them, we're thickly scaled slices of complicated." when in reality if you were a place build of onions up, it would be a rich delicate community of vibrant colors and soft skin. Personally I think you need to go beyond just the outward onion we see today in the supermarket and go to the plant itself.
Look at the flowers of the onions since this isn't just the roots, but also up, all the way up, not just to the bulb. Why isn't the government the flower, or the stem of the onion, and what about the actual flowers of the onion?
I really want to see you investigate this further and figure out how you want to work the metaphor completely instead of jumping subjects to 'leeks' and other onion families.
Ah! Thanks for the suggestions, you've given me an idea/insight to expand and develop this further, in next revisions ill try to incorporate the character of the speaker more, develop that along with the onion, which you're right in that it can be vibrant, colorful, and is more a process that goes into the drying, if thats not the perfect metaphor for the human growth/character development, dunno wat c: Thanks!
I love this, the imagery, but I have one nitpick: the word "sass" in the seventh line. I love sass in all its forms, but in this poem the actual word "sass" just doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the language. You've got "made from the roots of wild onions" and other earthy phrases like it--and then you've got "sass."
Maybe it's just me, but I suggest changing that one word.
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