Apocalypse

[bedeep]

Hi, Crow. I would love to see any revision of this you write. I agree with much of Knot's commentary. In prose poetry I prefer tight language, and as much specificity as the poem and its subject allow (though of course there are exceptions to everything!) So I would apply that kind of economy here.

Your imagery in the second paragraph is strong and juicy. I especially like the words "holding strange jewelry". I also appreciate the education offered here as I often wondered how people could gallop through a forest. (Seriously, I have wondered that!)

So if the first paragraph were tightened up and the second also, and perhaps even begin it with the child exploring, stumbling upon a dead camp, in the midst of that forest glory. The very end "what sin they may have done" etc. is quite potent. I am left with the idea of the child, experiencing the beauty of the natural world and then finding that horror within it....

Thank you for this read!

It was routine practice for native Americans to burn the New England forests. The fire cleared the underbrush. English settlers expanding west, in the early days, could ride horses at full gallop through the woods. But the first English to travel west from the colonies weren't men. They were disease. Smallpox annihilated many tribes, leaving desolated, pristine acres behind.  

A young family traveling out into the wilderness, therefore, would have been greeted with open fields, populated by troves of animals, their numbers unchecked by hunters who now, in strange poses, had wasted into skeletons, which could be found grouped in lifeless encampments, prone in empty fields, contorted and hunched alone against a tall tree in a New England cathedral forest, where a child might accidentally find them, and perhaps leave breathless and horrified, holding strange jewelry, or a knife, or a bone, wondering how to keep it secret, or what sin they may have done in the eyes of their violent, reckless Christ.