eclipse of the son

"안영" ㅠㅠ "안녕"이 맞아.
시 잘 썼네. 특히 그 잡힐듯 말듯 한 소속감의 표현이랑 너만의 경험들을 담아서 글 쓴거라 좋아.

Hello there herb - Lim here with a short review for your poem. c:

This poem gives off heartache and a sense of longing. I interpret it as being about non-belonging, and specifically about not feeling like one belongs in the place they were born and grew up. The word choices and imagery seem to centre around people and a house, which is why it made me think of ‘the place one was born’ . The first few lines speak of wanting to “drift” away from the “house” - and the “house” is explicitly contrasted with “”home” in the final two stanzas, reflecting how the speaker doesn’t feel that the place they currently are is somewhere they belong.

I also found the image of the moon to be striking. To me, the moon here evokes loneliness and seems to symbolise something to be reached for that seems unreachable. It seems to frame the scene with the (imaginary version?) of the mother as being dream-like. Along similar lines, I thought “fool’s glory” was an interesting phrase. To me it sort of associates the son/ the speaker with some kind of unreality - a dream, a daydream or maybe a farce?

Something I like about this poem is how you’ve woven the ideas of distance and mothers + fathers throughout the piece. It very much feels like the poem is interconnected and the figures of the ‘mother’ and ‘father’ appear in different ways.

A couple of questions I have for you as the poet:

1) The “i want to go home” refrain is repeated three times, and the punctuation is different for each. Is there a specific way you want those to be read? Does "i. want. to. go. back. home." have a faster, more staccato rhythm than “i want. to go. home.”?

2) How do you see the ideas in this stanza:

i miss the people i've never met,
i hate the people i've always had.
you will never know what i am,
what a mother and a
father means.
i will always scorn myself
for not saying it sooner.

Remind me to review this :3

Hullo.

Oy, what a purposeful, staccato-counter-traditional use of punctuation in this piece. You've put pauses where no "proper" pause "should" be -- and the stylistic choice rather neatly made me really think about not only what words were said but how they were said.

This is one of the distinct strengths of poetry. You've explored here to good effect.

I think -- I may be wrong -- that this could be the experience of an adopted child? Or if not, one with parents from different sides of the globe?

In either case, the use of the punctuation accentuated both a) dissonance and disconnect in the speaker's experience and b) an inability to speak directly and fluently about it. I'd call it embodied structure. I could feel the meaning as well as read it. It hit doubly in the final few lines with the fullstops: "but. I want to go.

home."

The only image that left be unsure of the meaning (both in sound and in actual fact of the words) was the one about the moon: "as my moon rises their son
is in fool's glory."

Perhaps it's an image I would know if I had more context? Is there a symbol I'm missing? Fool's glory?

Not necessary, but I'd love to see the phonetic representation of the Korean either as a **footnote or in brackets beside the characters.

This gave me an half hour of fun, just listening to it as I read it through a few times. And the melancholy contrasted with the hard edges of the unexpected punctuation created a music all its own. Many thanks.

Toodles,

IMP