Meeting the Echoes Again

I received such great feedback on how to keep the integrity of the syntax in the poem by letting go of some more florid phrases in the original draft. Since this poem is a terza rima, any editing and word changes at the end of a line can mean having to reverse engineer the poem to clean it up. The feedback as a whole never changed the narrative of the poem, but many words were changed. In the first stanza instead of “lanes,” I originally used “streets.” Changing this singular word meant altering the whole poem sonically (the rhymes and sounds would now have to be different), but the narrative functions the same as it would have stayed as “streets.”

On this night I gaze down four wistful lanes,

Each enshrouded in fogged grey clouds,

I see four figures bearing unhealed pain:

A pup of a boy, yearning to be loud;

He remains quiet, yet his insides stir,

For to perplexed emotions he is bound.

A teen, whose mind is a strange blobby blur;

Aghast my nose is devoid of white dust,

For to orange bottles he has been lured.

A young man, who found a semblance of trust;

He extends a warm hand to shake mine,

I oblige, then go on my way as I must.

Three apparitions now wholly benign;

These people who once haunted my present,

Are now echoes of time far and long behind.

The last wistful lane remains quiescent,

Who enters from this odd temporal plane?

I descry a visitor whom the future has sent:

A man, elderly, with a smile so tame,

Encroaches from the last grey fog-filled lane;

My bygone actions and his were the same.

Freddy is an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing. He is an ardent fan of Romantic poetry, Weird fiction, and Horror fiction. He prefers short stories or novellas for they are conducive to his attention span. If he is not writing, reading, playing video games, or making music, then he is probably eating a bowl of cereal.