(Untitled)

[cosmicchrist]

Spring flight

The insects take flight above me
    electrons orbiting
    an invisible nucleus

The hawks take flight
    drawing circles
    in the endless sky
    only to do as hawks do

The trees take flight
    only for a moment though
    their seeds rain down
    land on my head,
    a blanket for the ground

I take flight
    on this day
    a journey of the

Comments

[okkoto]

first two stanzas are good, they are solid images.

the third stanza is also good but the last line, comparing anything to a blanket is a little cliche: blanket of snow, blanket of sky, etc etc

4th and 5th stanzas move away from solid imagery and get into abstractions. the strongest poetry shows instead of tells. 4th stanza you write of flight, a journey of the mind, and a start of something new, but all of those are abstract, they could mean anything to anybody, it's not clear what the experience is. don't tell me about a journey of the mind, show me a journey of the mind.

5th stanza has "future" which is very vague and abstract, same with "everything at once".

It might illicit a certain feeling for you but not for your reader. You want to be as specific as possible so that your poem isn’t open to thousands of interpretations, though it probably will be anyway. i think Ezra Pound said "Go in fear of abstractions".

sometimes poets get away with it like Wallace Stevens, but he can smear a turd on a piece of paper and i would love it. well he can't because he's dead. but anyway he's just that good. usually he surrounds one or two abstractions with such concentrated pure poetic amazingness one forgives the abstraction.