07-17-2011, 07:39 AM
Is the one comma needed? The poem I think would be pretty much perfect without that lone piece of punctuation. This is a splendid verse Leanne. Words like "haggard" and "barren", when in used in conjunction with words like "womb" and "dream", create a semantic field of cruelty. It reminds me of a passage from Job: "Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light, but have none; may it not see the eyelids of the morning because it did not shut the doors of my mother's womb, and hide trouble from my eyes."
"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." - Gene Wolfe