Echo

[RiverNotch]

Revised.

Echo

Laying bare on moonlit water,
Swaying with gentle breeze. rhythmically and grammatically, a gentle breeze.
Say, in every shell living a soul? Why not a complete sentence? The developed ambiguity isn't an advantage, it only highlights the change as a mistake. And rhythm isn't an issue -- the meter's already inconsistent enough as it is.
Nay, there's nothing but an echo. "Nay" just sounds old, and for a poem that's supposedly serious in tone.....well, it adds to the problem described below.

I kinda think the poem is being pretentious. I don't see depth in denying the identities of all others, only idiotic solipsism, ie, adolescence. And unless you're gonna develop this with better humor or self-consciousness, this isn't gonna move out of the domain of the fifteen-year-old.

And reading your earlier comment, no, it doesn't show. As far as I know -- or at least depending on the analogous thought in the bits of Christian asceticism I've gleaned -- Buddhism involves the denial of the self, not the selves of others: in fact, others one is supposed to treat like others, both to help make the self utterly nothing, and, at the start more importantly, not to look like an asshole. "In every shell a living soul?" implies that the speaker is applying the philosophy to every one, not just himself, ie the much clearer solipsistic angle.