Hi Kathie,

Dan Sturn here very happy he tripped across this poem.

The way this Poem starts off simply draws us in with an image of somebody offering love . . .

MECHANICS:

I love how you appropriately punctuate this Poem, something that I rarely see on writing.com. What I mean by this: a sentence is a sentence, a line split into several lines are properly punctuated with commas when appropriate. Yet you also realize that when commas are not appropriate, they are also not required, like these two lines:

As long as the serpent stays away
with needles and candy.

However, those two lines are my only complaint . . . they do not comprise a full sentence. I think that you should have linked them to the following sentence, like this:


As long as the serpent stays away
with needles and candy,
he believes he can save her.

Anyway, the rhythm is consistent and the Poem is easy to read.

MEANING:

This Poem is one gigantic metaphor that can be read several different ways, meaning that the Poem itself offers a LOT of multivalence. The Poet could be writing about her lover, or her muse, or her god.

Given this, each metaphor within the Poem is a metaphor within a metaphor. In other words, the picture that the protagonist smooths at the beginning of the Poem could symbolize the act of writing, or simply a lover. In other words, we can even take this Poem literally, which is probably your intention in writing it!

The ending caused me to put this review away for a while and return to it, for it took me off guard. I'm still not sure exactly what it means.

Which makes this a cool Poem that one would like to return to!

Dan Sturn