IMAGE OF EARTH AND QUILL

Guest Poet Renee Maxwell



Picking Wildflowers

Fingers stained with flower blood
Crush tender herbacious scrotums
Poised to spew powdery pollen.

Pluck the heads from tubular 
Pillars towering above centuries
Ground into earth.

Trample velvet faces, snapping
Slender necks like a gleeful serial killer
Intent on his purpose.

Remorseless murderer of mute victims
Merrily frolics over the mass graves
Carrying a handful of colorful corpses.


January, 2000


Renee Maxwell's Questions:

1. In the first stanza, there is mixed imagery with the scrotums and the pollen and the blood.  Is this too much, does it need to be more focused?

2.  This is written in a sort of imperative tense, with almost no personal pronouns. Do I need to redirect the action to a 1st person narrative, or can I get away with this?







The Albany Poetry Workshop