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One Carnation

There is a fox hole in my backyard.
Foxes come there every spring.
When their kits grow older they leave
and I do not know where they go.

My land is on the slope of the hill.
Birds and rabbits have hard time walking on it.
Even snakes slide sometimes.
Squirrels move sideways using their front paws
to hold to the branches of mounting shrubs
sparsely growing among boulders.

After every rain I come to the bottom
to check the things that were loosely attached,
washed off, rolled down and had fallen.
Sometimes I can find pretty pebbles,
dry branches that look like dragons,
bones, broken skulls, the leftovers of foxes’ lunch.

There are not very many flowers and they rarely bloom
because the soil is exhausted.
Today I was lucky: I saw one red carnation.
I sat near it on a fallen tree
and dreamt about how nice it would be
if I had a green magic hand
because a thumb would not be enough
or better yet a green arm
all the way to the shoulder.
I would touch the bare ground
and turned red clay into a blooming carpet
of miniature crawlers strong and sturdy
to withstand mountain rains and mud slides.

Dreaming about it further, I thought
I might even revive the dwarf pine,
dead after giving in to
the last snowless winter.

Then I thought if I could fight death
I should be able to cure people.
I would give new teeth to my neighbor.
She saves money for years to have them fixed.
A new spine for my friend who
recently stopped running
because of a compressed disk,
a bone marrow for a girl I saw on TV,
a new heart for RC…

There are so many things to repair
that now after I think about it
I understand why
my garden stays bare
on the slope of a steep hill.
I look at the only blooming carnation
and I am grateful for it.

Review Request (Intensity): 
I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Review Request (Direction): 
How was my language use?
Last few words: 
I know it is long.
Editing stage: 

Comments

your poetry just flows
like the MISSISSIPPI
That's why you have abandoned
reading my poetry
lovely kids

I have not abandoned your poetry.
I have not really started reading it yet.
I am a slow reader. I was traveling this week and did not have much online time.
What lovely kids you are talking about?
Anyway I will come to reading your poems asap. Best,

IRiz

author comment

All the well tended gardens with their thousands of flowers and rich deep soil. And I pretty much ignore them. For what are they compared to a single wild flower blooming in a roadside ditch? Like your poem a great deal but it's Skull not scull and there are a few typos you need to fix. I also have built on a hillside and it works out well for me right now. I have replaced one knee and shall have the other replaced next spring so at the moment one leg is longer than the other which works well when walking a hillside until I have to turn around lol.........stan

What a surreal way of approaching your health. I wish you best of luck with the upcoming surgery. I am in a good shape, started rock climbing in October, now started 5.10a level. I love the sport.

IRiz

author comment

what is a well tended garden with many flowers, next to a single flower growing and fighting to survive in barren soil and unstable ground? I think you may have a little problem with the structure of the lines that describe the death of the Dwarf pine.

I would think that those lines might be better if they were to say:

Dreaming about it further, I thought
I might even revive, [no d] the tiny Dwarf pine
dead; after giving in to, the most cold and snowless
winter in many years.

Otherwise, nice work. ~ Geezer.
.

There is value to commenting and critique, tell us how you feel about our work.
This must be the place, 'cause there ain't no place like this place anywhere near this place.

Thank you. Great suggestion. I will look into it.
Any wrong spelling I missed?
I have intoduced the suggested change. The text improved. I thank you again. Please peek at my lines sometimes , your help makes a difference. Sincerely, Irene.

IRiz

author comment

look at your work, although it sometimes takes a while to comment. ~ Geezer.
.

There is value to commenting and critique, tell us how you feel about our work.
This must be the place, 'cause there ain't no place like this place anywhere near this place.

It feels warm to know that.

IRiz

author comment

I get your poem perfectly, you have found a nice touch to express a larger universe. It flows and reads easily and I enjoying reading because it flows nicely to it's conclusion.

I do have some thoughts about the last stanza: I would simply state:

There are so many things to repair
that now after I think about it
I look at the only blooming carnation
and I am grateful for it.

It implies the "understanding" without stating it, telling us what we know, what we feel from the closing words.

Eumolpus
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
ee cummings

Good morning, Eumolpus
Thank you for reading the long story.
I have to think about your suggestion,
omitting the suggested lines stripps the emotional tension of the stanza and put two lines ending with it together. What do you think about it?

IRiz

author comment

yet you always manage to bring it into the immediate now, with varying degrees of subtlety.

Your works as I have read them so far, if line breaks are removed, can often be read as poetic prose. I suggest that we have a good hard look at meter and other prosodic devices. It won't be easy, especially with English as a second language. Meter is the most important of poetic techniques, the difficulty exacerbated by the fact that pronunciation varies not just from country to country but often also from neighbourhood to neighbourhood!

Did you know that southern states Americans have tremendous difficulty with traditional English meter because their accent (though they will never admit it!) is heavily influenced by the French, which uses long and short vowels instead of stressed and unstressed vowels?

Are you up for the challenge?

ps What would America be if everyone painted their cars red?
A red car nation.

cheers,
Jess
A new workshop on the most important element of poetry-
'Rhythm and Meter in Poetry'
https://www.neopoet.com/workshop/rhythm-and-meter-poetry

It just happened that I posted on Neopoet, these few writes. If you see what I am doing now, I am more rhythmic, but perhaps it is hard to recognize.
Thank you for reading, you made my day.

IRiz

author comment
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