...awkward...

[celzmccelz]

Old Croghan Man

This is how we honor dead kings.

You sleep in your glass case in this

Dimly lit room, while curious faces

Peer at you, fascinated and repulsed,

Before flitting away like frightened fish.

In life you must have seemed a god,

Taller than all other men

Even in this far future time

You would tower over

All these

Comments

[carmarthen]

This is really brilliant.

[celzmccelz]

Aww thanks :)

[carmarthen]

I am staggeringly ignorant on poetry, so I can never think of anything terribly specific to say, but yeah. There is a lot going on here; it's powerful.

[shugurim]

It's very Seamus Heaney. From what I've read of him. Except slightly less opaque, which is good because that was what I didn't like about most of his poems. :P

I like "tribute to satisfy / Older and hungrier gods than ours"
and I really like the first stanza. But yeah, it's a cool poem. If I had to find criticism it would be that you do a little bit too much telling, and in a couple places it would be more exciting to replace statements with details that allow the reader to infer the statements. However, it's actually a little refreshing the way it is after reading so much poetry where poets get so into avoiding saying anything directly that they forget to tell us what the poem is about in the first place and we end up having to try to piece something together out of a bunch of seemingly-disconnected references and metaphors, which is only fun for literature majors.

But the biggest thing about this poem -- I enjoyed reading it.