XPost: alt.arts.poetry.comments, alt.poetry

On Wed, 21 May 2025 2:51:20 +0000, W.Dockery wrote:

General-Zod wrote:

Will Dockery wrote:

[email protected] wrote:

Deep Blue Sassafras

You never left:
As another day passes

your love
my love
continues.

You sleep
or you wander,
depending on the chosen myth.

But those
deep blue flowers in a box,
the color of your eyes,

the deep blue flowers
I found blooming
in the lumber yard

that I brought to you
that summer morning in 1982,

the flowers
that smelled like sassafras,

like you,
never leave my thoughts
day in, day out.

-Will Dockery
(Edit by George J. Dance)

This is an example of the editing work George Dance did on one of

my poems, for example.

Aw, shucks, Will; all I did was combine some of the lines and stanzas,
so it would fit on one page of the book, and fix the punctuation;
someone had complained that there were too many full stops for the
number of sentences.

(Ironically, the same person who'd complained earlier, then complained
about the revision having a "run-on sentence." There's just no pleasing
some people.)

Mr Zodiac wrote:

Outstanding poem.....

Thanks again.

It is a nice poem, and makes a good conclusion to the book. One part of
it that I think lifts it up from the ordinary is the sentence/Stanza:

You sleep
or you wander,
depending on the chosen myth.

Of course that could mean anyone's "chosen myth", but rereading it I got
the idea of a person choosing their own afterlife, an idea I've
encountered only once before (in Heinlein's /Job/).

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