Guadalupe River Haiku - edit

[TranquillityBase]

on line one: i feel like "hawk chicks" would be punchier. "tonight" is definitely redundant.

now the rest. the progression of images is off. taken as it is, it goes from dark to light to dark to light, or smallest to biggish to biggest to small, in a seemingly undirected fashion, but that's taking the young hawks as an *image*. "cry" here connotes sound, but the rest of the poem seems to be concerned with sight. this comparison between the visual and the auditory seems to be the cut for your haiku, but it's a rather uncompelling one. the sentiment you seem to be delivering is one of abandonment. what does it say, broadening the already very deep sense of abandonment in young chicks crying for their parent? nothing.

the moon is usually a symbol of fecundity, while in a lot of myths known to the west the moon's personification or commanding goddess has a mother or a mother figure -- the image evoked by calling it "motherless" doesn't seem to exist, or at least make any sense.

young hawks crying, meanwhile, is a good image -- and i'm back to letting 'image' be more of a figure of speech -- and having a good image to portray, with a clear idea of what sentiment you want to convey, is a good amount of the work done. you just need to choose more coherent images to compare with your main image, to develop a better reason for those choices, and to provide a setting for all those images -- both the central one and its companions -- beyond your title.

haiku should stand on their own. for a set of haiku, the title should be descriptive: this set should be called the Guadalupe River haiku because they're all set near or on the Guadalupe River, and not that the set shows scenes by the Guadalupe River because the title says so. while it isn't necessary to show us directly a bit of the titular river -- if this is going to be a part of a set, then the river could instead be shown by the later members, or else the river could resolve from all the details the set explores -- there should still be a strong sense of where the central image is, or where the speaker is in relation to this image. as it stands, young hawks crying under an evening sky could be anywhere.

RiverNotch,

Thanks for your detailed critique.  

Some background:  I spend a lot of nights just sitting in the dark on our patio.  I heard a strange sound, that continued over several nights, like two large birds muttering and complaining to each other.  I suspected they were hawks because hawks have nested in that tree for a couple of years.  But it was such an un-hawklike sound that I had to do some research to find out that hawk parents abandon their offspring at a certain point, and for a while the young hawks, not being very proficient hunters yet, will "cry" for their parents because they were not able to feed themselves enough.  The young hawks are still here but I guess they soon learned they are on their own and stopped making the cries.

So, these are not chicks, but young adults.  And yes, the main theme is abandonment (although the sound of their cries is what I'd really like to be able to reproduce).

I'm mostly dissatisfied with the second line, but probably not for the same reasons as you, and as for the moon, I can't be responsible for its mythological connotations.  If a reader brings that baggage along, that's their problem.  When I see the moon, I see a dead, sterile planet, left alone in the night.  I suspect the hawks see or feel something similar.  They are materialists like me 

Anyway, moon or no moon, you have convinced me that as a haiku, it is seriously flawed, and maybe haiku is not the form for what I want to describe.  But I'm going to give it another shot with your recommendations in mind.

Thanks again for taking the time to critique.