A site for May Day, an effort of poets from Winnipeg and beyond, taking place for the eleventh time in May 2015.
Monday, May 18, 2015
The imaginative child says goodbye
A broken pink plastic shovel rests beside the fresh hole in the
heavy clay that once separated you from the
shoebox where your
bunny lies curled on his side
like a comma.
i have difficulty with this segue: /beside the fresh/hole in the heavy/ clay that once separated/ ... am I going from the outdoors to a room with a shoebox?
I like the images but I don't really understand what is happening here either. the clay separated the child from the shoebox of his stuffed bunny? I tried to figure out what was going on, given the cue "imaginative" in the title...but I think I need more clues.
Why assume it's a stuffed bunny? The shoe box under the ground with the bunny in it was the bunny's coffin. The child tried to dig him back up, after the parents buried him, to say another goodbye.
Simple, beautiful, sad. I got it, probably because as children, my sisters and I had a graveyard in the woods near our home, where we buried all manner of wild animals and birds. We put them in small boxes.
OKAY NOW I GOT IT. Would the word "pet" or "lifeless" or beloved or something help clue people like me who go down the wrong track? I guess because everything else was toys and we were in a sandbox...pink plastic shovel...oh wait we weren't even in a sandbox!!! I think shoebox made me think of sandbox along with the pink plastic shovel, plus the hole, and then the bunny in a shoebox just confused me and I was still thinking of an imaginative child digging his way to a goodbye - maybe a hole to China from his sandbox, with his stuffed bunny...I totally did not get that he was saying goodbye to a real bunny. We have buried pets but not...in a shoebox I guess. I love the first and last lines, I just got a little diverted in the middle!
It took me a moment to figure out that the bunny was a real rabbit. At first I wondered if this was a favorite toy that had been buried for some reason and she was retrieving it… probably because my mom once threw out my brother's favorite stuffed toy and he ended up retrieving it from the town dump!
But that's a tangent… the brevity of this reminds me a little of imagistic poems like that red wheelbarrow one (I always forget if that's Williams or Stevens--Williams, isn't it?).
7 comments:
lovely childhood pictures...
i have difficulty with this segue: /beside the fresh/hole in the heavy/ clay that once separated/ ... am I going from the outdoors to a room with a shoebox?
Perhaps the word clay is causing the confusion. This is the clay you find under top soil, not modelling clay.
I like the images but I don't really understand what is happening here either. the clay separated the child from the shoebox of his stuffed bunny? I tried to figure out what was going on, given the cue "imaginative" in the title...but I think I need more clues.
Why assume it's a stuffed bunny? The shoe box under the ground with the bunny in it was the bunny's coffin. The child tried to dig him back up, after the parents buried him, to say another goodbye.
Simple, beautiful, sad. I got it, probably because as children, my sisters and I had a graveyard in the woods near our home, where we buried all manner of wild animals and birds. We put them in small boxes.
OKAY NOW I GOT IT. Would the word "pet" or "lifeless" or beloved or something help clue people like me who go down the wrong track? I guess because everything else was toys and we were in a sandbox...pink plastic shovel...oh wait we weren't even in a sandbox!!! I think shoebox made me think of sandbox along with the pink plastic shovel, plus the hole, and then the bunny in a shoebox just confused me and I was still thinking of an imaginative child digging his way to a goodbye - maybe a hole to China from his sandbox, with his stuffed bunny...I totally did not get that he was saying goodbye to a real bunny. We have buried pets but not...in a shoebox I guess. I love the first and last lines, I just got a little diverted in the middle!
It took me a moment to figure out that the bunny was a real rabbit. At first I wondered if this was a favorite toy that had been buried for some reason and she was retrieving it… probably because my mom once threw out my brother's favorite stuffed toy and he ended up retrieving it from the town dump!
But that's a tangent… the brevity of this reminds me a little of imagistic poems like that red wheelbarrow one (I always forget if that's Williams or Stevens--Williams, isn't it?).
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