Dionne Brand's "Blue Airmail Letter"

The entirety of Dionne Brand's "Blue Airmail Letter" is written as a letter from narrator Eula, in Canada, to her dead mother. Throughout the letter, the act of writing letters is referred to multiple times, often in the the form of apologies [for not writing] or as a comment on the limitations of words as a form of communication. Eula refers to this letter narrative as "writing [only] to commit an act, to write a letter" (237) and also to the act of writing as an aid to forgetting as opposed to a clarifying: "I'm forgetting you even as I write this letter. The more I write, the more I forget...perhaps I need to forget you now" (239).
Discussions surrounding the relative power and limitations of words reminded me of a creative writing exercise that I learned in the past. In this activity, the goal is to use only the words from one page of the dictionary (front and back) to create a poem that describes another idea/concept.
The following poem is constructed using this page from the dictionary:

























Storm
Street streams strait streaks
Straddle streetcar straps
strain
strain
strain
Stout

In asking various people to read this poem and identify its subject matter, no one was able to determine that the poem is attempting to describe "mud". Given the limitations of the single dictionary page I had, I wasn't able to express the idea, mud, in a way that readers understood.