The importance of a story's viewpoint Waking to a blanked landscape offers an opportunity to see it differently. Your mother's story of your birth changes but repeats that you were early and healthy, so that becomes what your family remembers. Your father's story is more hesitant and rarely heard: you were the tiny, fragile baby, he carried in the palm of one hand. No one noticed you didn't speak because your mother spoke for you and you were so well trained not to interrupt her in public. And if you'd said anything? You were told you'd misunderstood, your mother had never said that. The silence at the heart of you became a space where you stored your deepest secret. Others thought that your landscape could be mapped as paths, trees, houses, while failing to notice this wasn't the view you'd drawn. Would you take advantage of the snow and use the altered landscape to reveal what hadn't been seen? Emma Lee’s most recent collection is "Ghosts in the Desert" (IDP, UK 2015), she co-edited "Over Land, Over Sea: poems for those seeking refuge," (Five Leaves, UK, 2015), reviews for The High Window Journal, The Journal, London Grip and Sabotage Reviews and blogs at http://emmalee1.wordpress.com.
2 Comments
James Fountain
7/18/2018 04:14:50 pm
Lovely work, Emma. I particularly like the connecting lines of the second and third stanza: ' The silence at the heart of you/became a space where you stored//your deepest secret.' Hauntingly beautiful, and the poem unearths a universal truth in the way differing perspectives can pervert meaning.
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