The Modern Wreckage + The Child's Death

[Amylian]

Hey,

These two poems have been written when I was at the Modern Institute yesterday having nothing to do except waiting for students to show up, and damn them they did....!!!



“Modern Wreckage”
By
Ali Makki aka Amylian the Great


Inside the Modern Wreckage,
Inspiration is shot, dead,
Peaceful sleep is hanged,
Or sometimes suffocated
With Black Fumes,
Yet, speaking of it is prohibited.
Why?

Inside the Modern Wreckage,
People walk in a tightrope,
And they ask: Why are we dying
For sins invented by the King of
The People?
My dear King,
Never before had we celebrated
Animal production of 2010, had we?
What?
Were you not overproducing animals
Ever since? And weren’t you the shephered
Of the Modern Wreckage?


Regards,
Ali Makki aka Amylian the Great

[Amylian]

“The Child’s Death”
By
Ali Makki aka Amylian the Great
4:44 PM


At times, silence is the least of fear,
But oh, why her mother’s scream could she hear?
In awe of the stillness of air she strolled
Down the dark hall towards the soulful sound.

Out of Darkness, the room she reached,
Took a snap through the door’s hole,
And oh! Who was that doula?
Oh! Who was that bloody, soulless child?

The Child was dead,
The Child was dead,
Before love could he be fed,
Before to a loved one he be wed.

It thundered, and lightened as the mother wept,
As the poor girl, down to the ground she hit her head.
Why would you leave the world without a single word
Said? Why would you leave the world waving cries not?

At times, silence is the least of fear,
What if,
What if the only sound she could ever hear
Was the drone of the pram? And only the wind
That strikes the window next door?
Regards,
Ali Makki aka Amylian the Great

[hillwalker]

Modern Wreckage - begins as a condemnation of modern society presumably where inspiration is stifled.

I think in verse 2 it should read 'walk on a tightrope' not 'in' and 'shephered' should be 'shepherd'.

But as for the reference to animal overproduction I fail to see how this fits in. Unless you are suggesting people who lack inspiration are becoming changed into beasts - but the way it appears in this poem makes it read more like a stock-breeding update courtesy of News 24.

I also wonder why certain words begin with capital letters but not others since it is extremely distracting. If you are trying to give certain words more weight, capitalising them is not the way to do that. A word will only gain its own significance by how well it fits in the poem. It's rather like trying to make a sentence seem more important by ending it with an exclamation point - it never works.

The Child's Death - was easier to make sense of but not particularly poetic.

The over-use of exhortations - again possibly to add impact to the poem - has the opposite effect. We don't get to share the mother's suffering - we only get to hear her grief as if its has been expressed through a loudspeaker. It's far too melodramatic - and there are also some ungrammatical twists that make verse 4 virtually incomprehensible.

In fact the final verse is by far the best of the poem, probably because it is the simplest and focusses on the heart-rending image of the child's last memories.

H

[Delta40]

I liked the modern wreckage - although I wondered what it could all be about. It still retains some magic quality.

I found the child's death hard to imagine in the terms you have written it. The last stanza was good.