Muscles ripple through gleaming skin
Beads form and sweat trickles
Down a furrowed brow.
Each move shows the ache
In the overstretched sinew
From the strain of the oar
And the burden of your toils
What keeps you going, sailor?
What heartache pumps your blood?
What makes you keep rowing
To where the stars, the water and the land meet?
❤ this one
Thank you Susmita!
So fascinating to read the poems others wrote to the same photo … this is tight, tense, makes me feel the ‘burden of the toils’ I especially like “What heartache pumps your blood?” Such an interesting way to ask the question! Thank you.
Thank you @sarahw much appreciate your comment!
so surreal
Thank you so much!
Beautiful! 🙂 I love the questions.
Thank you, Kendra!
Choosing this one for comment because I chose the same picture to prompt my poem.
Love the imagery and the metaphors.
Confused by your use of “sailor” for a person in a rowboat, I looked again to see if there were sails somewhere and I missed them. That’s the fist time I noticed that there are no visible oars either. Am I being too literal or were you being more fanciful? I also thought of this as a rowboat at first.
All of this makes the toiling more meaningful, don’t you think?
I’m particularly drawn to this line:
“To where the stars, the water and the land meet?”
I probably would have changed the order, moving up from water to land to stars. Or moving down from stars to land to water. This order of locations in your lie got my attention because it’s not linear — suggesting that there is no straight line pointing your sailor to the destination nor one line pointing the sailor — and reader — to an answer to your questions. It leaves me unsettled. And that’s probably a good thing.
Thank you Shirl! All relevant questions. And you’re right, I’m only using the horizon “vanishing” point from that picture, not using literal sense. But yes I did refer to oar.
Do note that this is the first draft and not the final edited version of the poem. Not even the second draft. As I’m sure is the case with most people.
Thank you for visiting and commenting, much appreciate it!