The moon measures lost noons with shadows and occult chants flecked with sprinkled stardust; the gravity of tides pulled to the nadir. Her zenith is constant, an arc to our vision that would make perspective singular. The ruminating moonlight, driven far by the querulous chatter of dawn songbirds, sends a ruinous opaque sky--a punishment-- in her wake, and decends to the zenith of another sky, teasing the soft melting alacrity of the lover's of the night and admitting the obtrusive glare of daylight to her receeding shadow, an opalescent grip of false conviction and forced cheshire smiles.
Geez, I think it's pretty sad that no one's commented on this piece. (I suppose the forums still haven't changed when I was used to be here.) I can say though, that this is one of the most thought out poems I've read on here in a long time. I'd say there's very little that needs to be fixed on this poem except for one line. And that is the very second line, "and occult chants flecked with sprinkled stardust." I kinda got the feeling that that line was somewhat out of place, a filler, even. That, and the cliches should always be avoided. Now, the cliche of this line was mainly "chants flecked with Sprinkled Stardust." Mainly I say that this line is out of place because of your beautiful use of vocabulary. I mean, you're spittin' out words like zenith, nadir, alacrity, etc...and the word sprinkled stardust just seems...bleh. I'd also say some people could possibly have a problem reading poetry with big words used so often because it's also a way of them feeling like the writer's looking down on them (I have no problem personally,) but sometimes you, the writer, have to be careful doing that. However, most people who write decent poetry should probably have no problem with this. There were a couple of times though where I thought maybe it seemed like you tried too hard to fit these large words in the poem, as if cluttering it up, somehow. I loved the ending, and the poem; it was pretty damn good. I hope I didn't offend you, I think you're a great writer, even if some (most) of the people on this forum aren't smart enough to know that. -Scott
I really like your perspective on this. First of all you are definetly right about the cliched star dust. I'll do something about that. Secondly, yes you are right that sometimes the large words complicate things for some readers, I often take that into account and try to write down to earth type stuff, but this poem was actually a tribute to the beauty of language, and some times you don't get the same beauty from "bottom" and "top" that you would get from "nadir" and "zenith" . In general though I agree with you. Thank you for the time you took to respond to this. I'm always grateful for conscientious critisism, positive or negative. -Autumn
I loved this. I might be interpretting it in my own special way, but it led me down a cool train of thought. Actually, reminds me of one of Bright Eyes songs, Lua... "what is simple in the moonlight by the morning never is"
Wow, this is great, with a perfect ending. the only thing I didn't like about it was this stanza break: It really confused me. since you said "decends to the zenith," which makes no sense. Of course it's clarified in the next line; but it's one thing to break a line in the middle of a thought, but it's something else (for me at least) to start a whole new stanza that way. Took me a while to make the connection.
I understand the confusion now that you pointed it out. I thought that since there was no punctuation there one would just carry on reading to the lext line (stanza). Thanks for the observation.
That things worth about $200 in $10 words =) your words are beautifully chosen. Reminds me of a very old style poem, where vocabulary mattered. It seemed as if you were trying to see how many big words you could get in there after a while though, not bad, just a bit much. But thats just me, its beautifully thought out over all. good job.
