Half of the World Away Isn't Far Enough to Stop You

Ooh, this is fun.

I'll agree with Audy on a few notes, namely that I love how this feels very heavy and almost hard in it's precision - it definitely works, I think.

However, I rather like the use of "scratching" over other words, because to me it sounds labor-intensive, and just the thought of scratching at stone for so long that it's etched lends it more weight and a sense of more time passing, which then ties into infinity and the concrete reference to twenty years. Anyway, yeah. I like that word choice.

To nitpick - I'm not sure i like "may" in the fourth line. To my ear it's an extra syllable in the line you don't need, and it gives a sense of indecisiveness - but it ends up more tied to the action of going down the stairs, and while I like the contrast between the permanence of carving stone, I'm not sure that it works where it is. But, that's a small pick, to be sure.

I absolutely love your last couple lines.

Thanks for the read!

Hey Silver,

I like how this poem almost feels like a piece of granite in the way that it is non-relenting in its narrative, it is, and it is there. It doesn't flow, it pounds. It chisels and I don't dare doubt the intentions of the speaker.

I can logically piece together in my head the time and effort it would take for a person to carve a symbol on a table with so meaningful yet ineffective a tool as your own fingernail, and while I can logically piece together the images, I still don't really feel it on a visceral level to where I can be fully satisfied when I get to those end lines of "enough time and effort", I guess in a way, I want to feel that effort, as though I were climbing up a steep slope while reading it so I can get to the end of the line and feel like whoo! What a work-out!

Certain technical elements:

I think a more precise verb than "scratching" granite, maybe grating? I felt scratching was too soft an action for "fingernails of rusted iron". I wanted to really feel the uumpth there.

Same for "come down the stairs" -I felt it a mouthful when a single word "come" or "join you" will suffice. Is the coming down the stairs an important line? This is a minor nitpick but just for reference - I had to backtrack in my thoughts because when I first read "my table" as opposed to "a table" or "the table" -- I don't know why I initially thought it referred to a bedroom nightstand or bedroom table, and then the idea sort of clashed against the next few lines as I had to correct myself, wait -no, kitchen sink!

I get the repetition of marble. I think by the "third" marble I was tired of it. Marble grave and marble tomb are synonymous. You only need one. That being said, I don't mind the repetition of marble hands from a marble grave / (or marble tomb) I thought that was brilliant and rather ghostly effect that still kept this hard-granite like feel with the rest of the poem, I liked it!

Now the sweet spot - the end lines. When I intitially read it, my interpretation for the narrative was about the subject "she" as a character who waits and longs for her lover for 20 years into her death and grave. From the title, we get the sense that it could be distance keeping them apart, though that is really the only hint of that. I kind of want to read the "coming down the stairs as a sort of "drifting" down, and think to myself -- is the narrator a ghost? Though that is me adding things in, rather than reading for what the poem shows as a whole xD I guess I want to naturally create a conflict or tension between the two subjects seemingly not meeting, but at the same time, the narrator comes down for tea which is odd because I was under the impression that the two lovers do not meet. The line "marble tomb because twenty years wasn't enough for her to cast aside the necklace" seems to imply that she waited until death and held the hope of the neckless, which I assume is a necklace of the infinity symbol? ) Another interpretation upon writing the review, I thought -- well if the narrator IS a ghost, and we take the title to mean "half a world away isn't far enough to stop you" are we to mean that the "she" in the poem commits suicide to join the narrator for eternity? That is a stretch interpretation :3 I admit.

There is a ghostly impression with the marble-marble and this almost automatic movement we get from the "she". The narration too is semi-omniscient that helps deliver these ghostly feelings. Anyway, just my thoughts!

~ as always, Audy

Hi,

It is such a nice piece of work. You poem is short but full of words enough to feel the balladry. I loved it. I sensed each and every word , you have written. I loved the starting, "she writes symbols on my table" , it is a fine start. I loved the whole idea. It is fantastic to read good poem. You did exactly what you had to. I loved the vocabulary you used in your poem. It is a short, first-rate poem, I have read.

Keep up the good work.