Karen Heidrich Shifting
Sands Divers
descend through layers of blue and neon fish
scatter like bursts of fireworks. With
outstretched hands, they wave food--stale
scraps of Holy cheese on white-- to
entice the greedy, food to
tempt the timid out of their lairs. Its
fare oozes between the fingers, suspends
in a cloud, settles
over the sand. camouflaged
in skin of shifting colors. It
waits in the dark, whips
out without warning, stalks
its sisters and boots its brethren out into
a sea of open graves. for
a purpose, starve for
a higher power. Victory
waits on the other side, they believe
sending their children in is justified. God, help
us distinguish
between the worthy and the wicked. Buoy
the weak to the surface, and
let the insurgents sink. Lord, tie
Samson's hair with loose restraints. Blur
the boundaries, the shifting sands that
separate the species, the
ideologies, the schools of
split-tail jacks and jellyfish. Poetry
Exchange Report The writing
assignment, a poem, was a daunting project but Minot, in the required text,
offers advice about generating ideas that made images flow.
From a list of people, events, and personal experiences that have changed
me in some way, I wrote two poems, both inspired by strangers.
One is included below, without critique and revision, as an example of
what I learned from the text about using line, negative space, and sound:
A
madonna, shrouded
in a cotton dress--
too worn,
too plain not to be ignored. Instinct
curls her shoulders forward--
fetal,
frail as a withering flower. Aware
of being watched, she turns gracefully.
Smiles
weakly.
Blinks
vaguely. A
mother, reliving
the blue dawn, unable
to revive its breathlessness, crumples
from its stillness. I was prepared to use the better of the first two poems for the assignment. While waiting for feedback, the fear of revision prompted a third poem, generated from personal experience. The abstraction was greed. The vehicle was feeding fish while scuba diving. Although the idea was far from dense, it seemed worthy of a poem. The writing of the first draft, predominately imagery, preceded the anniversary of September eleventh by one week. Emotions that would have gone into a tired conversation worked their way into and between those first few lines, adding an unexpected layer. The piece that follows is the second draft, written in three-line stanzas and deriving its poetic sound from consonance: Invading
unannounced, descending in a cloud The first critique is from Sandra K. Moore, most recently published in contemporary fiction. In the local writers' group where we met, her critiques were sought after. Excerpts from our email exchanges explain some of the changes made to the above draft:
. . . the rhythm is a
little off because the poem overflows with gerunds (-ing words). It's as though
there are few actual sentence subjects to latch onto in the first couple of
stanzas, which leaves the line breaks doing all the work . . . Sandra's
comments helped turn sentences into lines of poetry. Her suggestions were accompanied by explanations, too lengthy
to be included here. Although I
used most of her advice, some of what I didn't use inspired other images.
For instance, she suggested personifying the imagery in the third stanza
but I chose to conceal the names of the animals and play up the camouflage.
Mary Bel Garza,
a fellow classmate, critiqued a draft similar to the final version.
She found the imagery in line eight confusing.
That comment fit closely with Sandra's suggestion to use only the imagery
to paint the picture. Because two
critiques agree, I changed "world-weary" to "skittish" to
describe the fish, thinking the original word choice disrupted the image for
Mary Bel and created confusion. Although
I wanted every word or phrase to have a double meaning, I did not want that to
be obvious in the first stanza. Based
on more of Mary Bel's critique, I made several changes to improve the clarity of
the third stanza. The assignment
required two critiques but, before settling on a final draft, I wanted a
critique from a male perspective. Joe
Cuellar, another classmate, critiqued the piece and offered a detailed
interpretation that was similar to what I intended, yet not the same.
For instance, he said Samson’s hair made him "think of Samson
string that is used for a variety of purposes when fishing." If the
revision of that stanza works, the prayer quality will invoke the reader to
think only of the Biblical Samson. What
I thought most interesting, however, was that Joe visualized the setting
differently than I planned. He
said, "The first stanza reminds me of the manner in which Somalian warlords
use food as a weapon against their own people. The [diver] reminds me of
helicopters landing in some of these ragged towns where the only thing that
separates the blue sky in the background is the broken neon signs hanging on
what used to be buildings." I wanted the
reader to envision paratroopers, supply drops, and blinding bursts of gunfire
but Joe's eloquent interpretation provided an equally meaningful image. That
gave me several choices. I could
change the title to fit the setting. I
could add something to the last stanza so the reader knows the boundaries and
sands of the poem are the borders where America and others have provided a
military and political presence, from Gaza to Lebanon and west to Iraq. In the end, I decided leaving the setting open to
interpretation might give the piece a sort of timelessness that would invoke
readers to personalize it, to place it in a setting most meaningful to them. For me, the
poem is finished. Whether it is
publishable quality or not, I plan to send it out and see what kind of response
I get back. Getting my name out and
having my work read is a step toward future publication.
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