Portfolio Revision 3- Sound Poem

 

    The following is a revision of my sound poem, "A Tree in Fall". The main critiques on my first poem were that the plot was a little abstract until the second stanza. In this version I wanted to ensure that it was clear what was happening throughout the poem. I shifted around the lines, as in the first version I had tried to use the same words to end each line in both stanzas. I figure now that this was boxing me in, and forcing me to settle for lines that did not otherwise follow the plot. In this version I decided to split them into quatrains, with five lines in the last stanza to wrap it up.

    Another critique I had gotten was that my original did not share with the reader a stance, and it was hard to determine exactly what the reader was supposed to take from it. I believe this was because I had been focusing too much on the sound part of the sound poem, and not enough on the content of the poem. In the revised version, I tried to offer a little more perspective so that it read more like a story. The working title is still "A Tree in Fall", but I hope that now that the falling of the tree is more explicitly stated then the title will be a bit clearer. 

A Tree in Fall

In an old growth woods, one snowy winter, 

stood the hollowed and rotting structure

of a tree that died when the thunder

struck it down in lightning fire.

Stripped of all her amber treasure,

winds that rush just like the water

of bitter rivers in December

break as waves on her crooked posture.

She's falling, now, before her sisters.

Her final draw of breath, a whisper,

a creaking, groaning sound to hear

to anyone who might be near.

Though she has no fruit to bear,

and her twigs dance in air no longer,

and her branches will never flower,

there's something more she's left to offer.

As detritivore begin to cover,

and the earth begins to decompose her, 

her life seeps to the soil around her

giving up her blood to her sisters

to feed another year, another December.

    I wanted this poem to be as some kind of hope after a storm. Even after life dies it is recycled by the earth, and I think that even if you do not take this poem literally you can still feel like there is a life after a metaphorical death. People often look at trees as these old beings that harsh year after year of the raw elements, but they still die, and when they do it is important to remember that it is not the last step of the process for them. I want to show that even these symbols of persistence in the storm are still vulnerable, and though they fall, they are still important for the cycle of life to continue.