humming
she reaches for laundry
sets it on the table
slowly folding them
to the melody of her own song
piling each shirt in 3 rows
one for each child
house smelling
of clean clothes
i turn to the stairs---
a sound
splayed on the floor
red soaked shirts
unabated sound
--wailing
say what you think.
Sorry, you cannot respond to an archived poemReviews
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definitely a chainsaw...
Iphios,
hahaha! this poem is fresh. it starts with an unusual sound, then has an innocent middle stanza where no one would suspect anythings wrong. so the ending was a surprise for me. hahaha. it makes the humming in the beginning maleficent and foreboding, but i didn't catch that tone until the end.
from the title, i guess the poem is either a) a scene in your head which occurs in a "split second," or
"split second" refers to the sudden change from calm to hysteria in the poem's ending.
now the images are just fine. but if this is supposed to be a quick flash of images (a), then you need to remove the words that bog this poem down, which make it read read more like prose. try sentence fragments. you can remove words such as "and" and "the" - just give pure raw images. flash-scene or not, the poem will read more fluidly and rapidly.
the last stanza is the strongest, as it should. an example of how you could tweak it is :
splayed on floor
red soaked shirts
unabated sound
- wailing
anyhow, great idea,
Pap
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Hey Pap,
Well, its called 'split second' because it came to me in a split second, and well it echoes the time it took from scene 1 to the scene 3. However, i'll take your suggestions. It does work. The minute i read your suggestion on cutting down the poem to sentence fragments, i knew where to start. Glad this came out fresh. I was playing around with the image of a person folding clothes and the possible shock that can happen.
-iphios
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Papyrus
April 22, 2008