By Santiago Orozco
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Dawn and Dusk are the same,
like mirrored Gemini’s
so it’s the moon glaring back at me tonight.
It keeps the ocean on a leash and
reigns it into its lonely dark side
There violence creeps
down the cratered cracks
and rusts against dying dreams.
The waves go back and forth.
There lies tell the truth of misery,
they feed a ghost hungering for clarity.
The ghost stares back to me,
and the waves go back and forth.
There memory remains callous,
looking back at the moon’s astronomical origin,
looking back at the meaningless war of fire and rock,
mocking the ash that now masks the victor.
Yet the waves go back and forth.
Here relief guides me.
The stars are my canopy.
A hazy sliver of sun kisses the moon’s crescent.
Maybe it reminds me of how little we all know.
How little we all are.
My footprints in the sand are fossils
waiting to be drowned by the wind.
As I turn back, the birds laugh at me,
singing at the waves gone silent.
Critique
I really appreciated the tone of this poem—quiet, a little reverent, and contemplative, very fitting to the nighttime setting. In that sense, the style of the poem meshes very well with the content.
However, this poem could benefit by making its abstracted concepts more tangible to the reader. You’re dealing with phrases like “truth of misery”, “relief guides me”, “hungering for clarity”, which should be powerful and evocative, but instead I found that they weren’t nearly as impactful as some of the other lines. The problem here is that you bring up an emotion, but that’s it—there’s no more language to back it up, so the sentiment ends up ringing rather hollow. How can you describe that feeling of misery or relief in a way that will connect with the reader, and says something new and fresh about the experience of that emotion? For this reason, the second stanza was my favorite out of the poem. Rather than being an abstract concept, the “violence” manifests, and we can see how it “creeps down the cratered cracks and rusts”. A poem should bring in the physical, material world just as it brings in ideas and emotions.
The ending was great—it had a sense of closure with the narrator turning back, and the recurring motif of the waves is at last silenced, making for a satisfactory finish. Thank you for sharing your work with us!
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