Posts: 250
Threads: 85
Joined: Dec 2013
cicad
- - - - - - - -
here
you offend the stones with your ladle
you bait curses
pale underfed
living in canes
in a land so poor
even I look good to the gods here
I pray on a bead
leaked from your silo
would lime on my scabs be too much
the sound of wax and liquor tasting
not enough left to baptize
think wet, and you'll drown me
they swear by winter
to lord brown on a white coat
blasphemes the drone
delirious exile of the wicker waste
where you
have let a droplet
wide of your beak
it shatters the sun
A yak is normal.
Posts: 37
Threads: 6
Joined: Nov 2025
You are clearly aiming for something mystical and surreal, but right now this poem is more random than mysterious, and more incomprehensible than evocative. I have read it thru several times and I still do not know what it is even about. Hunger? Divinity? Suffering? A treatise on post-apocalyptic agriculture? Surrealism is ofc a fine and respectable tradition, but I feel this poem is more opaque than it needs to be.
Now I will try to assess it along the three metrics the forum mods suggest.
Method: Your lines breaks seem more arbitrary than meaningful. There is structure, but the logic behind it is unclear. There is no rhythm or clear pacing, it reads like three different poems that were chopped up and them mixed together. You do not use punctuation whihc is fine, I usually avoid it in poems too, but you do not replace it with breaks that carry the missing weight of punctuation, rather your lines seem to end when you felt there were enough words on the line, not when there is a natural pause.
Manner: Your imagery is often very interesting, but equally often so murky that it seems almost meaningless. "I pray on a bead / leaked from your silo" is an interesting line, but it is never followed up on and conjures no clear image into my mind. What is the relationship between prayer, beads, and silos? Why are beads leaking from silos in the first place, what does that even mean? Are these silos filled with rosary beads? Are the beads a metaphor? Are the silos? It raises so many questions, none of which the poem answers, that it leaves the reader to shrug and dismiss the line entirely. There are also some lines that really do not work at all, and just seem like a joke.
In terms of euphony, there is not much to go on, which is a shame since it would go a long way to help with the disjointed lines and lack of punctuation in giving the poem some kind of structure.
Your metaphors are often intriguing, but you never develop any of them, with the result that they start to seem like nonsense. “delirious exile of the wicker waste” is a great line, but what does it mean? Beats me, and I have read your poem several times.
Matter: As I said, I have no idea what this poem is about. It reads like cut-up poetry, except the juxtapositions feel random rather than transformative
In all I did not hate this poem, but I did find it very frustrating, and I was left with the nagging suspicion that I am being played for a fool by trying to make sense of it. Cryptic poems are great when there is enough for the reader to get an idea of what is going on, but I fear this is erring on the side of vagueness.
