(08-19-2012, 10:14 PM)Universalchild Wrote: It isn't a cult, but it is a ceremony. It is an ancient buddhist ritual which is meant to purge a demon from a person (in this case, a teenage girl) - by dunking them in water. A lot of rituals involve dunking so really it could apply to any of them. In this situation, and it is based on a true story, she simply drowned because they were over-zealous and held her under for too long.If you're talking about the case in Japan where a teenage girl was "exorcised" by her father and a monk, it was a cult -- the Nakayama Shingo Shusho, a "Buddhist" offshoot that is rejected by other Buddhists. Buddhism doesn't recognise demons as it has no place for good or evil. There are purification ceremonies involving water, but they are certainly not exorcisms.
That doesn't mean, of course, that the poem itself is wrong. I feel it would be much stronger without Western religious words such as "devil" though. Also, there are cliches such as "unleash the beast" (which is not made less cliche by using inverted commas) that could be removed. The first two stanzas are quite strong as they are "showing" -- when you move to "telling" the poem becomes less interesting to me.
It could be worse