The speaker of "Sanderella" never says the river is dying. The poem opens instead with an order: "Collect alluvium and built-up sandy land / On your own breast." Alluvium is the silt a river carries and drops, so to gather it on one's own breast is to build the very thing that will bury you. The address is tender, "Oh my river! Oh my quiet stream river!", yet what it asks for is surrender. The fourth line makes this plain: "Confine yourself in your own confine." The repeated word folds back on itself, as if the river were being told to shrink inside its own shrinking.
The title seems to be a coinage that fuses "sand" with "Cinderella". That is an inference, but the poem supports it. Cinderella is a neglected figure who is later transformed, and the river is neglected too and is also changing into something else. What it becomes is sand, and the poem never settles whether that counts as a rescue or a loss.
The second stanza is the shortest and the most threatening: "Water-grasses grow-up, / Stealthily suck your life and life." The hyphen in "grow-up" slows the word down, like a stem pushing slowly upward. The hissing consonants of "Stealthily suck" make the line itself seem to creep. The phrase "life and life" is odd. We expect a second noun, such as strength or breath, but the same word comes back, as though the river were being drained twice or the language itself had run dry. The danger here is not violent. It is the slow, quiet growth of things that live off a weakened body, and the river's own quietness, praised a few lines earlier, is what leaves it open to them.
In the third stanza the poem turns from address to description and slows down. "Lies on side the decayed boat for a long time / For a long time didn't come any boatman or goers." The phrase "for a long time" appears twice and is the only clock the poem has. The word order is bent ("Lies on side", "didn't come any boatman"). Whether or not the English began as a translation, the awkwardness suits a scene where things have slipped out of place. "Goers" is a plain, slightly strange word. It reduces people to those who cross, and with the river no longer crossable, they have simply stopped coming.
Then comes the poem's strangest image: "Children of wind only flatter golden sand." The breezes are personified as playful children, and the verb "flatter" suggests praise that is not quite honest. "Golden" gives the sand the glamour of treasure, even though it marks the place where water used to be. The children sing "In a low and indistinct tone / With clapping of joy." The repeated "They sing / Sing" at the line break stutters like a tune being picked up again. The capital "In" in the middle of a line leaves a rough edge that no one has smoothed. Because the song is "indistinct", we cannot tell whether it is a lullaby, a celebration or mockery. The only living voices left are cheerful, and that cheer is the most unsettling note in the poem.
Formally, "Sanderella" is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre. Its energy comes from repetition (confine/confine, life/life, for a long time, sing/Sing) and from the shape of its three stanzas, of four, two and six lines. The narrow middle stanza sits between the other two like a squeezed channel, and the long final stanza opens out like a sandbank.
The poem matters for how it handles loss. It has no villain, no flood or dam, only accumulation: silt, grass, time, wind. The speaker's affection and the cruelty of the commands pull against each other, and so do the gold of the sand and the rot of the boat. It can be read as a picture of a real waterway, or as a figure for any life or place that narrows and empties while the world around it carries on humming. By ending on a song instead of an elegy, it leaves the reader unsure whether to mourn or to join in, and that uncertainty is what the title's fairy-tale pun asks us to consider.