01-25-2015, 11:33 AM
NICU, For Dominic
Your first breath holds ours frozen, after all That sounds kind of weird. After all....what, all things? In which case it'd be somehow insulting instead of tense or uplifting.
the weeks you grew inside your mother's womb,
arriving early with an anxious bawl.
I count the possibilities of doom
and triumph on your toes, my abacus,
as monitors and regulators beep
and flash your vital signs. You mildly fuss Fuss and abacus don't rhyme at all. Also, "you mildly fuss" sounds weird to me. It doesn't really convey the same sense of "baby!" to me as all the other things here. Scrapping the "mildly" and using a stronger adverb might do it for me here.
then slip back into artificial sleep;
your dreams a mystery of graphing flares. Although graphing flares looks interesting the way I already see it (lots of little lines making Cartesian planes in the darkness), it still doesn't show the monitor thing right.
I trace fine lines on palms, your future: grand I kind of prefer ending the thought here. Maybe it's a bit of a break from all the rest of the poem, but just leaving the baby's future as "grand" sure does make it seem more grand than what the next line tries to do.
achievements, escapades, sweet love affairs...And then you could just scrap this and pose a new, related thought, especially with "escapades" ruining the meter here.
your secret strengths read in each tiny hand.
Although our place does not dictate our worth,
we cannot earn the luck or curse of birth. This feels neither like a neat little summary nor a classic heel face turn. It's like, for the whole of the poem, you talk of the delights and whatnot of having a new babe in your corner, and then suddenly you muse gravely upon the kid's existence. Sure, it's sort of related to the palmistry and abacus parts, but it feels more like a big restatement of an idea that doesn't show up as importantly in the rest of the sonnet.
Also, if this is supposed to follow Shakespeare's model, shouldn't the general thoughts also follow the layout of the rhyme scheme? Like, the first four parts speak of this, then the next four lines speak of that, then the next four lines speak of this, then a neat little couplet to cap it all off or throw it out altogether. The womb-doom part becomes very disconnected by the fourth line (in that the anxiety of the baby being out there doesn't really follow with the speaker counting out the kid's doom by the last line, at least not until the next four lines, but by then I was expecting a wholly different set of elaborations); so does the grand-hand part, by its first line (that is, the dreams of graphing flares doesn't follow up with the palm-reader's arc). Only the fifth to eight lines really follow this sense, since the toe-count is the one which directly starts up the fussing, and yet it is sort of painful that those four lines are the ones with the bad rhyme.
I suggest that on the first four lines, you focus solely on how anxious or breathless you are about the baby, describing the whole toe count only when you get to line five. By lines five to eight, just keep up with the whole divining-your-future-with-your-toes-thing, but again, with the toe count being already described there, and with the awkward rhymes being completely scrapped. Then maybe you can elucidate more on the tenderness of the babe and the elusiveness of its fate on lines nine to twelve, using palmistry there as some sort of, er, framing device. And at the final couplet, just switch the words up a bit so that the summary is more on the babe being nice, or having a weird fate, or, well, something, but I can't vomit out the right words.
Your first breath holds ours frozen, after all That sounds kind of weird. After all....what, all things? In which case it'd be somehow insulting instead of tense or uplifting.
the weeks you grew inside your mother's womb,
arriving early with an anxious bawl.
I count the possibilities of doom
and triumph on your toes, my abacus,
as monitors and regulators beep
and flash your vital signs. You mildly fuss Fuss and abacus don't rhyme at all. Also, "you mildly fuss" sounds weird to me. It doesn't really convey the same sense of "baby!" to me as all the other things here. Scrapping the "mildly" and using a stronger adverb might do it for me here.
then slip back into artificial sleep;
your dreams a mystery of graphing flares. Although graphing flares looks interesting the way I already see it (lots of little lines making Cartesian planes in the darkness), it still doesn't show the monitor thing right.
I trace fine lines on palms, your future: grand I kind of prefer ending the thought here. Maybe it's a bit of a break from all the rest of the poem, but just leaving the baby's future as "grand" sure does make it seem more grand than what the next line tries to do.
achievements, escapades, sweet love affairs...And then you could just scrap this and pose a new, related thought, especially with "escapades" ruining the meter here.
your secret strengths read in each tiny hand.
Although our place does not dictate our worth,
we cannot earn the luck or curse of birth. This feels neither like a neat little summary nor a classic heel face turn. It's like, for the whole of the poem, you talk of the delights and whatnot of having a new babe in your corner, and then suddenly you muse gravely upon the kid's existence. Sure, it's sort of related to the palmistry and abacus parts, but it feels more like a big restatement of an idea that doesn't show up as importantly in the rest of the sonnet.
Also, if this is supposed to follow Shakespeare's model, shouldn't the general thoughts also follow the layout of the rhyme scheme? Like, the first four parts speak of this, then the next four lines speak of that, then the next four lines speak of this, then a neat little couplet to cap it all off or throw it out altogether. The womb-doom part becomes very disconnected by the fourth line (in that the anxiety of the baby being out there doesn't really follow with the speaker counting out the kid's doom by the last line, at least not until the next four lines, but by then I was expecting a wholly different set of elaborations); so does the grand-hand part, by its first line (that is, the dreams of graphing flares doesn't follow up with the palm-reader's arc). Only the fifth to eight lines really follow this sense, since the toe-count is the one which directly starts up the fussing, and yet it is sort of painful that those four lines are the ones with the bad rhyme.
I suggest that on the first four lines, you focus solely on how anxious or breathless you are about the baby, describing the whole toe count only when you get to line five. By lines five to eight, just keep up with the whole divining-your-future-with-your-toes-thing, but again, with the toe count being already described there, and with the awkward rhymes being completely scrapped. Then maybe you can elucidate more on the tenderness of the babe and the elusiveness of its fate on lines nine to twelve, using palmistry there as some sort of, er, framing device. And at the final couplet, just switch the words up a bit so that the summary is more on the babe being nice, or having a weird fate, or, well, something, but I can't vomit out the right words.