In My Mother's Bedroom After the Funeral

[CalebPerry]

I think I see what you mean now. I replaced "made" with "forged" (forged as in created) because I was trying to spread out those long A sounds, and the way the line is written, only one-syllable words will fit. Previously, I used "forged" as in "forged ahead".

Before:
It was a battle ship that sank today.
She worked and she built and she made,
at home, in the world. She forged a sea
that she herself had poured. ...

Now:
It was a battle ship that sank today.
She worked and she built and she forged,
at home, in the world. She cleaved a sea
that she herself had poured. ...

Obviously, I still have work to do. Given how many words the English language has in it, I run out of words more often that you would think.

Thank you for looking in one more time.

[bjondon]

Perry, I'm puzzled by the logic of the seconf half of S1
- surely she tucked that letter into the night-stand
before she became unable to climb the stairs . . . and keeping an
ancient letter from a friend seems perfectly normal to me.
Churning through personal possessions and giving significance
to odd items is also typical of dementia.
Having said that, I liked the gentle pre-amble of this first
stanza which leads us unsuspecting into the force of the tribute
that emerges in the second. And actually I thought the combination
in a single sentence of forging and pouring the sea worked partly
because of the incongruity. Metaphors are strange beasts -
they do not have to be strictly logical. The rewrite doesn't make it
sound such a big deal whereas the original image felt like she was
commanding the very elements.
Jules

[CalebPerry]

Jules, the incongruity in the first stanza is that the letter was 57 years old. If I owned a 57-year-old letter that was important to me, it would be packed in a box in the attic. The problem I have in the first stanza is that I can't lay out the timeline too explicitly lest the poem turn into a short story. She had stopped climbing the stairs just a few years before.

So you really liked: "She forged a sea that she herself had poured." What I have now is "sailed" instead of "forged". I can probably change it back to the original. I just need to find a way to spread out the rhyming sounds so they aren't too intrusive.

Thank you for looking in.