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[miyako73]

Mine is a story
Mourning widows avoid
And clowns do not want to hear.

Before I could start,
She showed me the scars
Of the old stitches on her belly.

The moment I smiled,
He asked about empty chairs
And muffled laughs in dimmed lights.

I felt her pain
Of losing and birthing
A husband and a fatherless son.

I knew how it was
When his memories of faces
Came masked to vanish into smoke.

I am a widow,
An old, arthritic clown
Waiting for children, looking for my child,

[Delta40]

Mmm. I felt you could have conveyed this sorrowful theme more powerfully miyako.

[PrinceMyshkin]

S1 l2 should be "Widows avoid listening to"

This so spare, Miyako, so spare, with such sure, swift strokes. I feel as if you left the room the instant you finished it, and closed the door firmly behind you.

[miyako73]

Thanks for reading Delta. I tried to subdue the sorrow in this poem. I guess the image of a clown refusing to cry and a widow looking strong in black confused me or moved me to be subtle.

[Delta40]

It's probably more me than you miyako atm. I've had a sleepless night. Let me revisit it when I'm refreshed.

[MorpheusSandman]

I was not particularly thrilled by this effort. I think you get off to a bad start when the opening stanza is an awkward mix of a full sentence and fragmented free verse, meaning that there's a missing "to" after "avoid to listen" (and shouldn't it be "avoid listening to"?), and the inclusion of clowns seems to strike completely the wrong note in this context. This is exacerbated when the next several stanzas all read as perfect full sentences (although seemingly a bit chopped up to make it verse). The rhetorical repetitions "Before I could/Before I could, I x/I x/I x" don't seem to create any meaningful or substantial parallels between the corresponding verses, and even though the lines have a similar length on the page, I think they lack any rhythmic correlations to pair them well together. Likewise, there's no consistency in the images, no development of the motifs (the only echo is the one about the clown in the first and last stanza, which I still don't think works).

I feel like to make this work you'd be better off making it even more fractured and imagistic than it is. Avoid prosaic lines like "Before I could start" and "I felt her pain" and "I knew how it was," as something like "When his memories of faces / Came masked to vanish into smoke." has much more poetic potential than what precedes it.

[miyako73]

Thanks, Prince and Morpheus. The nuance of the english language is, indeed, my literary weakness. I will edit and edit until this sounds right.

Initially, "waiting for children, looking for my child" popped up in my head out of the blue. The next thing I knew I was writing about a widow and a clown to make my initial thought work. It is nice a challenge to extend a seemingly idle thought into a poem.

[MorpheusSandman]

^ I can certainly relate about trying to shape an entire poem around a single line, as this has happened to me more than once. An idea might be to develop this into a ballad or to try and make that line a refrain of a villanelle. Just something to think about.

[miyako73]

Also, the form in this poem was patterned after the conversations I heard in the past such as:

When my grandpa died someone told my grandma:

Condolence...
We are here for you.
It's time for your husband to go.

At McDonald's:

Welcome!
I'm Ronald McDonald.
Have fun and enjoy your meal.

I know it sounds funny. Poetry, to me, is also about memories.

[Hawkman]

Hi Miyako. The first thing I'd do is cut the first and last verses. The meat of the poem is in verses 2-5. by cutting the intro you create more immediacy. In S2 you can dispense with the definite article in the 3rd line. S3 you have a he instead of a she. This doesn't work for me. Stick with she. I'd also change the last line to read, "and muffled laughter in dim light" which has a more natural rhythm.

S4 I think I'd change" her" to "the" in line 1 and cut the indefinite article from L3.

S5 I'd change the tense and turn it into a resolving comment:

"I know how it is
when memories of faces
come masked and vanish in smoke."

Actually, with the above edits I find it quite an affecting poem.

Live and be well - H