Two paces forward or ten steps back?

It can do your brain in, this writing business.  I've been staring at - working with - these lines for hours.  They're a bridge in a poem that started out in life as Blackstrap Molasses.  It's something different now. 

Theirs was an alien landscape, force-fed

From that once-mighty river; no longer

The greatest nor, ever again, the nation’s

Life blood. Sucked dry. Like metaphor. 

First there were three lines.  Now there are four.  And the chances are that there aint much poetry in them whatever the number of lines. But you keep at it because the voices don't stop.

There's a Clydesale horse in it.  Makes sense to me.