A215 Draft of Poem

I'm realising something sad - for me but perhaps a relief for agents on my hit list - is that my novel is not good enough. It has to be a practise novel. I am going to use one of the protagonists, the soldier's wife, and write a book about her. I'll take bits and pieces from the discarded novel and a lot of the story line too.



The thing is this; when you start writing a story and nearly four years later, you're still with it, you've changed, your writing's changed - I'd like to say matured but who knows. So I've been trying to edit words that at best, leave me cold and, at worst, make me cringe.



Here's a draft of the first poem I've written since I was fifteen. A few summers ago. It's part of the OU Creative Writing course. Not good enough for a TMA so I'm putting it here so I can find it again.



Oh, please tell me if you've chucked an entire novel and started again? And do also tell if you know any good books on character creation because that should have been where I started - with very detailed characters. Story and plot come next, in my humble opinion.

A Cornish Village

On Cawsand Bay in spring

We’d run to meet a topaz sea

Skate barnacled rocks that bled our feet

And saffron sand as hot as larva

With diamonds glinting in the waves

We’d taste the brine on childish lips

And thought that life – just like the sky

Stretched on and on forever

In Cawsand village in summer

We’d sing a siren song

To trawl the sailors in from Plymouth

And hold them in our girlish arms

How they loved our wild brown eyes

And flapped like fish in nets of hair

They spoke of loves in English towns

But spilled their seed in Celtic coves.

In Cawsand quay in Autumn

My baby son and I

Threw bread to angry gulls

And watched grey water writhe and rise

Then with small fat hands my child

Skimmed spitting surf with pebbles

Worn down to shallow flint

And I kiss the softness of his neck

And pray that times stands time.

In Cawsand square in winter

I pass the tourists spying

On my home, my life, my loves.

I am a ghost. They pass right through me

A faded women by a silent sea.

I will shed this skin of ages

And dive among the jewelled fishes

To find the mermaid in my soul

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