Angeline Yap (b. 1959)
FEATURES / TRACK CHANGES
Communion
Written by Angeline Yap
Dated 30 May 2020
As an introvert and a perfectionist, I revise my poems till I am satisfied before I submit them for publication. Consequently, I highly doubted that I would find a published poem to revise. Ironically, I found two published versions of an old poem, "communion", which is in my collection, Closing My Eyes to Listen, as well as online. If I remember correctly, this poem was first written in the 1980s, and I revised it in 2010 for Closing My Eyes to Listen.
Communion (c. 1980s)
Look
and see again,
in kerbside weeds
made sovereign by the sun,
whole fields of lilies
spread out by His hands,
know, now,
the firmness of His grasp,
be still, and feel
your heart made carefree
once again.
The second version omits the lines “know, now / the firmness of His grasp”:
Communion (2010)
Look
—and see again, in kerbside weeds made sovereign by the sun,
whole fields of lilies spread out by HIS hand;
be still, and feel
your heart made carefree once again.
If I were to revise this further today, I would probably remove the first instance of “again”. I would also consider changing the way the lines “be still, and feel / your heart made carefree once again” are laid out. Here are the possibilities I've been working on:
#1
be still
and feel
your heart made carefree once again#2
be still and feel
your heart made carefreeonce again
#3
be still and feel
your heart made carefreeonce again
#4
be still, and feel
your heart made carefreeonce
again#5
be still, and feel
your heart made carefreeonce
again
#6
be still
and feel
your heart made carefree
once again#7
be still
and feel
your heart made carefree
once again#8
be still
and feel
your heart made carefree
once again
There's no full stop—which is intentional.
I'm not done yet, but I am still deciding how I would like this last line to read—my preference is still varying from reading to reading, and this tells me that I am still not quite done. Usually, when I am writing a new poem, I know that I have exhausted my revisions when I am no longer excising words and lines or moving them, but making tiny changes, for e.g. in punctuation.
I suspect my final decision will depend on the quality of stillness that the line evokes. What I'm looking at is not just the words, but the silence between the words, and the resonance that follows after the last word — at the kind / quality of silence that the poem conveys. I think I know what I'm aiming for; I just have not quite decided whether I've captured it, such as in this other poem of mine:
Dragonfly
I want a line so clear it sings
so sheer you hear the sunshine
through its wings
Tentatively, this current revision of “Communion” could read:
Communion
Look
and see,
in kerbside weeds made sovereign by the sun,
whole fields of lilies spread out by HIS hand.Be still
and feel
your heart made carefreeonce again.
In conclusion, I started work on the following poem while I was thinking about this exercise, so I saved some of my revisions which could be a helpful illustration of my revision process.
Hypothetical
(Thoughts for a piece in progress)
The shoreline shifts
The waves erase amend reviseYet their beauty remains,
Here, at this boundarybetween land and sea.
In this scheme of things,
What matter how we place a pebble
Or whether we shift a grain of sand?
The last stanza was at first:
In this scheme of things
What does it matter whether I
shift a grain of sand?
Which became:
in this scheme of things
What does it matter how
Or whether
I shift a grain of sand?
Then:
What, in this scheme of things,
Is the placing of a pebble
Or the shifting of a grain of sand?
And finally:
In this scheme of things,
What matter how we place a pebble
Or the whether we shift a grain of sand?
