/lit/ - Literature

Post your poems. Critique other people's poems: you know how it works. I'll start:

"Picasso’s Guernica"

Anguish crystallised
into quaintness. All eyes open,
rapt with something black-and-white
memory has lost. A bawdy punchline
has startled them, frozen puppet-faces;
stocking-beasts, eyes bemused, emerging
like rude gags from the blast.
A painted candle stretching
the swing, the creak of a door,
the mummer’s still leg
dragged to her horse-fallen confederate:
a mural, an exotic village play.

How blood clots, lava
cools; sheeny paint dries to
grey on a pale stretch of canvas.
Screams stagger to laughs; pain
that signalled war in past
stalls for a few forced minutes
in a museum, then lets go.

"Picasso’s Guernica"

Anguish crystallised
into quaintness. All eyes open,
rapt with something black-and-white
memory has lost. A bawdy punchline
has startled them, frozen puppet-faces;
stocking-beasts, eyes bemused, emerging
like rude gags from the blast.
A painted candle stretching
the swing, the creak of a door,
the mummer’s still leg
dragged to her horse-fallen confederate:
a mural, an exotic village play.

How blood clots, lava
cools; sheeny paint dries to
grey on a pale stretch of canvas.
Screams stagger to laughs; pain
that signalled war in past
stalls for a few forced minutes
in a museum, then lets go.

"Picasso’s Guernica"

Anguish crystallised
into quaintness. All eyes open,
rapt with something black-and-white
memory has lost. A bawdy punchline
has startled them, frozen puppet-faces;
stocking-beasts, eyes bemused, emerging
like rude gags from the blast.
A painted candle stretching
the swing, the creak of a door,
the mummer’s still leg
dragged to her horse-fallen confederate:
a mural, an exotic village play.

How blood clots, lava
cools; sheeny paint dries to
grey on a pale stretch of canvas.
Screams stagger to laughs; pain
that signalled war in past
stalls for a few forced minutes
in a museum, then lets go.

>>6943001

I am writing a historical fantasy novel. It's about the coming of age of a girl with unusual strength and speed, after she's been captured by the Vikings during a raid on her village.

This will be my third draft of it. The story is more or less set, though I've already found I'm tweaking it. What changed has been my ability: my writing style and my overall sense of storytelling changed for the better over the summer, and I ultimately realized that the second draft no longer represented my best work.

I like to work in fantasy because I feel the unreal, the supernatural, often contains some of the greatest truths for our own existence. I also am a lover of metaphysics, and this can be drawn out slightly more readily in fantasy than in other genres. Yet again, however, I believe that real people can believably exist as characters in fantastic settings, and that human struggles don't become any less profound if some of those struggles include, say, fighting a dragon.