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Sandia Plain (Free verse) by Dovina Thick adobe walls
naked and worn
shells of lives
dots on the desert
of Sandia Plain
Those heat-holding walls
held sun through the night
and night through the day
to warm by in winter
cool in the scorch
But modern builders
with smarts and studs
raised wooden walls
covered with hot tin roofs
So people bought
and thought they were cool
having what better people had
not mere earth but sheetrock
Beside painted siding
abandoned homes melt
and slough to statues, and
Grampa asks why the heaterâs on
Then a breed of practical souls
rediscovered adobeâs good
set mud again drying
on Sandia Plain
Blocks of dried earth
ready for stacking
in modern adobe walls
protecting folks
As the ancients knew
in winter cold
and summer heat
revived on Sandia Plain
Up the ladder:
The Comedy of Mighty Rockmage: Combatting Old Age.
Down the ladder:
Mountain Gorillas
Votes: (green: user, blue: anonymous)
Arithmetic Mean: 5.25
Posted: June 21, 2005 7:15 PM PDT; Last modified: June 21, 2005 7:15 PM PDTWeighted score: 5.029801 Overall Rank: 7346 Comments:
A bit too detailed, almost reads like a scene from a National Geographic docu.
One 'adobe' too many, look for a synonym
Sun-dried mud bricks is a synonym, but too long. Yes, it's a documentory. I'd hoped it would also sound poetic, but I guess it doesn't.
My suggestions:
1) Punctuate. 2) Stop writing all of your sentences the same, and making them all like "Beside painted siding abandoned homes melt and slough to statues etc, etc, etc." I'm at a loss to explain exactly how simplistic and yet totally unnatural your sentence structures are, and how there are a lot better ones. You're just going to say, "But my sentences have so many words! So many subordinate clauses!" 3) Include similes. People like similes. Really, modern poetry's like 1 simile or metaphor per 2 lines. That's about it. You're as always perfectly entitled to tell me to bug off.
2) But my sentences have so many words, so many subordinate clauses, so many look-alike elements, so orderly, so neat, so rational, so boring.
My first thought is that your sentences are basically all simple past formulations with a bunch of adjective or noun phrases added, something like the sentence "The snake, sensuous and sinuous, slipping its tongue on stones, slid silently seesawing its spine in the sage to scout out supper" is really just "The snake slid."
But I don't think that's the case, really. For one, the first sentence in this poem doesn't even meet that description. Actually, it's not even a sentence. I would take a look at verb tenses, though, for starters. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen anything other than simple-past and present-participle. Sorry I can't be more help. I've been Arak today, which in addition to be a tasty licorice-flavored liquor is also the Arabic word for "sweat."
I mean, "I've been DRINKING Arak today". Tee-hee.
Incidentally, the liquor Arak and the country Iraq are derivations of the same root: sweat. In Arabic they're spelled almost identically.
My first "sentence" has no verb. It's just a series of descriptive phrases, designed to set a scene. The others are, as you say, a bunch of phrases with a verb, maybe boring, but defendabled as prose.
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What you have written makes me wonder about the author and not about the poem itself. Does that make it art? I don't know. I'm trying to figure out your motivation without knowing you. This is a lot of NOT thinking about the above words.