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The Salty Kiss
In the last hour I saw it
Like a lid sliding across the sky
The great face that wrought our doom
Highlighted in the sudden twilight
Eyes like moons and ears folded back
Vast lips in an Australia-sized pucker
Pressing through stratosphere, displacing clouds
And Earth groaned, tugged by alien gravity
And turned to meet it
As the titanic mouth bent to drink
Tidal waves from the impact sucked back in
By that enormous draft
Hurricanes circling around the lips like smoke rings
And the coastlines growing as the ocean shrank
Fish and boats tossing in the slime
At the bottom of the largest cup on Earth
And when its thirst was slaked--
Have you ever eaten a morning-picked apple
And sucked off the dew before biting it?
Like a lid sliding across the sky
The great face that wrought our doom
Highlighted in the sudden twilight
Eyes like moons and ears folded back
Vast lips in an Australia-sized pucker
Pressing through stratosphere, displacing clouds
And Earth groaned, tugged by alien gravity
And turned to meet it
As the titanic mouth bent to drink
Tidal waves from the impact sucked back in
By that enormous draft
Hurricanes circling around the lips like smoke rings
And the coastlines growing as the ocean shrank
Fish and boats tossing in the slime
At the bottom of the largest cup on Earth
And when its thirst was slaked--
Have you ever eaten a morning-picked apple
And sucked off the dew before biting it?
So... this is from the perspective of a tiny being living on the surface of an apple? Or, I guess, that's the analogy being made, but some huge creature is drinking off the oceans before it takes a bite out of the planet? there's the literal interpretation that this is a disaster actually happening, but I could take the separate italicized stanza two ways. One, as in the explanation for what's happening in the first part, or two, inverting that, such that the italicized piece is what's really happening, and the rest is the imaginings of someone eating an apple. I kind of prefer it the second way, since that makes it sort of fun, whereas the actual disaster would leave me wondering about the context.
Structurally, I don't know if the arrangement buys anything. It's more a prose poem either way, and with the way the language is, I still would consider it poetry even if it were presented as a paragraph. Though maybe my preferred interpretation of it would tend to make that last stanza lend the rest a feeling of purple prose more than poetry? I guess it visually sets my head up to consider it poetry, but I don't know that I'd read it differently either way.
Structurally, I don't know if the arrangement buys anything. It's more a prose poem either way, and with the way the language is, I still would consider it poetry even if it were presented as a paragraph. Though maybe my preferred interpretation of it would tend to make that last stanza lend the rest a feeling of purple prose more than poetry? I guess it visually sets my head up to consider it poetry, but I don't know that I'd read it differently either way.
Having a definite first-person narrator:
In that first line and then an implied but different first-person asking me the question at the end gets me shaking my head. Structurally speaking, I'd prefer the POV to remain consistent especially since the perspective becomes pretty darn omniscient as the piece goes along. I'd recommend keeping that wide "disaster movie" view right up till the stinger in the last two lines deflates it. A lot of fun, though.
Mike
In that first line and then an implied but different first-person asking me the question at the end gets me shaking my head. Structurally speaking, I'd prefer the POV to remain consistent especially since the perspective becomes pretty darn omniscient as the piece goes along. I'd recommend keeping that wide "disaster movie" view right up till the stinger in the last two lines deflates it. A lot of fun, though.
Mike