What they have given back
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2 critiques written · 1 received
Welcome — and this is a stronger first poem than mine was. The acrostic is doing real work because you never once announce it; I had to notice it on my own, which is exactly right. The specific objects are what carry it — the cat stopped waiting by six is the line I keep returning to, more than the bed or the coffee, because it is the only image where the absence has a schedule. If I am pushing on anything, it is "stubborn as a bruise" in the second stanza, a phrase I have read somewhere before, and the rest of the poem has not.
The turn at "which means take your mother" is the best sentence here — the logic of packing collapsing into grief in one clause. The last sentence is weaker. "You will not be the kind of person who has occasions for a while" explains the plates, and the plates did not need explaining; leaving the good ones was already the whole story. I would end at "Leave the plates." You lose the aphorism and keep the wound.
A series of their own
Quiet Harbour's own poems, grouped and ordered by them.