rotting

[Cousin Kil]

The crack in her ancient voice
repeats, echoing in the hollow Is she speaking from the grave? Is this an action that is actually happening or metaphorical to a degree?
of her trunk, blanketed in soft green. Haven't heard trunk used in this sense. I like it a lot.
Her dents cave in, collapsing.
Crumbles gather in the cracks;
microbes clamber through the litter. I think this is your best line.
She was once an upright bastion,
now millions crawl through
her splayed and broken corpse.

I was eating when I read this. Mistake on my part. And I think that's a good thing.

Your images are grotesque and methodically so.

However your poem isn't very emotive to me-- and that's not to say that it should be-- but I find myself kind of empty after reading it. Maybe that empty feeling is what your after?... But the take away still isn't much for me, except for perhaps the idea that humans can be "bastions" as you write, earth-shakers in how they live their lives maybe, but eventually end up returning to the ground like anything else. If that's the idea you're after, cool, and I got that. But I can't say that's a particularly new one, though nothing is really new.

I guess I would say make your language more unique in some way. The line that stood out to me was "microbes clamber through the litter". Other words I liked were "trunk" and "bastion". Maybe if you were to tackle this idea with more language like this, I'd receive the poem in a new way. You can't make it new, but you can make it feel new.

Or maybe, thinking about "trunk", you can focus in on the idea of death as a journey. This is why I liked the word "trunk" so much, and maybe even why you chose it. Death as a journey isn't a new idea either, but it's a capturing one and something I think can hold some emotional pay off.

And so can the idea you have so far. It's just as of now it reads to me like some very well-constructed observations that don't make me feel much, however eloquent.

But maybe I'm just missing something.

Thanks for the read,
Cousin