International Women's Writing Guild
Hi friends,
I started working on this poem months ago during June Gould's fabulous online IWWG class, and I just finished a draft I'd like to share and collect feedback/critique on. I appreciate any thoughts and suggestions on the poem, as well as suggestions for places I might submit it for some kind of publication (I'm fairly new to this). The poem is copied below and also attached.
Warmest wishes,
Kayleigh
Working title: Even at your peak
You don’t remember this but
before you became, I became you.
Ages before you even sensed the sun-warmed surface,
I layered it with clay and stone and dirt
and grew great green forests upon it.
I sprang rivers within and guided their ever-changing flow,
watered generations that no longer exist
before you slurped in a single drop of morning dew.
Before you cast your first hint of shadow upon the ground,
I flooded entire oceans with water and salt and life
and filled them to depths so far from the sun that every day was night.
I breathed life into gill and lung
and swept countless wings on infinite journeys
before you felt your first breeze.
You tower above all of us now, you regal thing,
my tectonic crescendo
complete in your crystalline folds.
I do appreciate your majesty—
even in the absence of modesty—
because I remember when there was no you.
Before I mashed my insides together with all my might,
crushed them up up up,
squeezing and thrusting you closer to the sun than ever before.
Each of your jagged outcroppings
and all of your wind-worn ridges
were once me, only me.
You’ve become more
than the sum of my clay and stone and dirt propelled skyward.
Yes, you’ve grown your own great green forests and guided your own rivers.
But remember, young mountain,
you weren’t so much as a speck of dust
until I became you.
Thanks to Adrienne Wolfert for the second line.
Kayleigh,
This is an eloquent poem with hints of an old psalm or ode. This is my go to for publication options: https://www.pw.org/
Click "Publish Your Writing" on the left-hand side. I also use Submittable https://www.submittable.com/
There is a search and follow function.
Thank you so much, Lisa! I appreciate the feedback and publication suggestion :)
Hey, Kayleigh--
THANK YOU for getting the ball (and poem!) rolling on using Writer Share for feedback/critique.
I dig the working title: it sets up (for me, anyway) the expectation that the speaker will be discussing a human using a mountain metaphor, only to find out that it IS a mountain being discussed!
My constructive feedback is to experiment with the effects of different line- and stanza-breaks to enact the content, and to excise what you really don't need: certain qualifiers/amplifiers, conjunctions, etc.
It's easier to demonstrate, but I hope you won't feel I've transgressed on you and your poem:
You don’t remember this:
Ages before you sensed the sun
-warmed surface, I layered it:
clay,
stone,
dirt,
I sprang rivers within, guided their changing
flow, watered generations that no longer exist
I really love the alliteration in "grew great green"--it would predictably be a
tongue-twister, and yet it's not; it amplifies the greatness!
FYI: There's a grammatical miscue in the last two lines of the third stanza
above; structurally, "before" modifies "exist" because "exist" is the closest
verb to the adverb. I get that you intend it to modify "sprang"/"guided"/
"watered," but it's not reading that way.
I agree with Lisa: this is a poem of praise. To test-drive another version, you
might consider recasting it as an ode, and a metrical/rhymed form would
enact the solidity, majesty, regalness (form-ality) of a mountain:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/ode-poetic-form
Thank you so much for the feedback, Marj! I appreciate the suggestions and will certainly fix the grammar mistake (the horror!).
Thank you!
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