I remember racing up a different hill
each night
with you
so we could unearth
each speck of black
and white creations
the sun
too often hid.
Our foreheads touching
under teasing hints
of fire in the night;
Waltzing white smudges
of the comet,
fragmented corpses of dead
planets shot with ice;
A painter’s cut canvas
of the moon—
rubbed-off circle and punched
through with gray and mottled
silver foil reflecting
in the lake
and on the grass
poking at us
through our camisoles,
carabid beetles skittering brisk and vigorous
up our backs and through our hair
splayed like silk
on wood.
Do you remember?
You were so jealous of me
because I could tell you every name of every star
and every genus of every butterfly
floating on streams of wind like leaves on a river
in the night—
but most of all how I could dash up the hill
and leave you behind.
(You never could run well, even
when you were running away from me.)
The world
was moaning
with a gyrating of its head,
yet
you didn’t dare
to look,
and I remember your turned-away face
in the starlight—
smooth like deep breathing
and lachrymose
like the knowing
of worthlessness.
How I ached to give you
the flesh and tendon of my legs
like the thickest thousand-year oak
in place of your purple,
shaking limbs
like whips.
I know my tongue
is still as limp as a bleached whale
around your dusky,
ancient eyes,
but I managed to spit out
something
along the lines of this:
There are so many stars and moons and comets
in the nothing round the Earth,
and we’ll never
see them all, but for every one
we do not give our love,
there’s two people
like us
on the other side
of the earth,
pointing to them,
and saying,
“Look how they move.”
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Canary word: Present
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125,008 Literary Works • 672,827 Reviews
This poem is amazing. It shows such wonderful emotion. To be honest, I almost teared up. You have a true talent. Your figurative language is really impressive. I hope to see more poems from you.
This poem is just plain beautiful. It was the prefect structure within it. All though some capitalization was a little off, you wrote this near perfect poem that I adore deeply. I love you figurative language usage and your beautiful creation of a poem.
This is a really beautiful poem. I like the sentence structure, how it's broken up, and the overall picture that it paints, but I dislike how you used your capitals. I think you should take a look at your capital letters again and decide if they are actually at the start of a sentence. The main one that I can see while I'm writing this is "In the starlight- Smooth...." there are two capitals there where there should be one. Hyphens are not end punctuation last I checked, and "In" is in the middle of the sentence. It would be strange if In was at the beginning of the sentence.
With all of this, I think this poem is a little hard to get into when you're looking at it for themes and what the metaphors actually are. I know that climbing hills typically represent achievement, and the person is surely achieved since they are able to name so many things. If it is not supposed to be a metaphor, the poem makes better sense, so I think I'll take this poem as a memory. The first stanza is a little confusing too because I really don't know what some of the things are, such as the white and black creations, or what is supposed to be stray with waltzing smudges. Stray is one of those verbs that needs a direct object after it, and the only direct object we get is rocks. I'm not sure if that is supposed to be rocking motion or the hard thing formed by hears of heat, pressure, and friction. This area is at the beginning of the poem so I think it needs to be a little more clearly defined to have a super solid piece.
Thank you so much for your detailed review! I checked, and wow my capitalization was super wonky. I didn't even notice it when writing. As whether or not it's meant to be a metaphor--for me it is, but take it as whatever you want it to be.
Stray was actually supposed to be an adjective there, and describing comets--you now, pieces of rock not connected to anything else, just hurtling randomly through space. To be honest, it probably was not clear, so I'm just going to change it to mention both the comet and the moon by name.
Thank you! I really appreciate it.
I really loved this poem, your vocabulary is excellent and allows for brilliant mental images. I also am able to really feel how close these two people are, it makes them real and gives their bond a much deeper meaning.
Just a few minor things I found..
1. "Ous", I think you meant "ours"
2. I feel when you say "You got jealous of me" that changing 'got' to ''became' would keep the mature feeling of the language.
3. The same thing goes for when you say "you were never a good runner" I would rework it to something like "you were never good at running", but that's just me.
4. I don't feel there's a need for parentheses in this poem, but again that's just personal opinion.
All in all this was an exceptional piece!
Good luck with your further writings
Thank you so much for your comment. "Ous" was really just supposed to be "vigourous" from the line before. I seperated the syllables that way to get some kind of rhythym right there, but it really wasn't working. I also agree that since the speaker is obviously trying to come across as mature that all her language should match. Thank you! I still feel like want the parentheses, but thank you so much for your help and critique!
Hi primrose22,
I want to start off by saying that this poem is very beautiful and I really enjoyed reading it. I don't have much to say review wise except that I think that it would be better if, instead of saying:
"My forehead and yours touching..."
You could say "Our foreheads touching..." This makes it concise and helps it sound more mature. Hope I helped and once again this poem was very beautifully written. Keep writing!
Thank you for the comment.
I'll definitely consider your suggestion.