Noddy
  Junior Member

You are of course correct about the folks on the website in every respect, their motivation and their poetic preferences. Where we part company I think is over the issue of what you call technicality and I’d prefer to call craft. I truly believe we can have tears and technique. The so-called judging criteria that gets dutifully attached every month nudges us toward taking tears and technique into consideration when we’re responding and I tried to do that when responding to your poem. That it came off as heavy-handed to you I regret. I simply subscribe to the notion that every writer/artist has to at some time get to grips with the craft involved in any creative act. It’s clear to me from many readings of your poem you yourself were striving for craft. We’re not so far apart really.
My thanks for your honesty. We can keep the conversation going any time you like! Cheers  more »

Although the poem is at odds with itself both rhythmically and metrically (the abcb slips up in the second verse, recovers and just hangs on; the 5 3 4 3 iambic pattern also slips up in verses 3,4 and 6) and could use another round or two of revisions, for this reader the poem was engaging on a visceral level.
The central metaphor of a legacy, a “carrying forward “ as the poet puts it, that sense of unfulfilled potential finally brought to fulfillment, of debts paid in the very person of the son and his willingness to pick up those”shreds”(shards?),“sedentary” (sedimentary?) aspects of a life less lived than undergone, is forcefully captured in the overall wistful tone of the poem.
Although the momentary lapses of craft cause the poem to stumble and intrude slightly on its overall success, these are more than redeemed in the strong imagery and the elegiac quality of the whole. Ah yes, mothers and sons. more »