Lotus river blooms
Into voracious color which
Fully blind and devour my
Eyes.
~
Crac Ked dusty
Lostland, where
Into rocks whirlwinds whip and
No one sees a snakespawn
Growing; a sly
Ssandy desertchild.
~ ~
Twilight graveyard, vine-laced.
Old worms gnaw, giving back to dust.
~ ~ ~
Throbbing energy streams
Hit darkharddead places but
Energy clings fast.
~ ~ ~ ~
Struggle is the fullness of life!
Through this dark, life glimmers-
Rising from the strangest places
Always hopeholding on,
Now growing, now failing, but
Growth is aided by strain.
Every complex lifestem, crafted
Superbly by toil.
Total variance created by
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Particular pains of existence:
Lavastrong skin and windfilled wings.
Always life molds itself,
Clinging with unimaginable
Ease to the
Strangest of places.
Author notes
First time doing the acrostic form since I was at school! Hope its ok.... I tried to highlight the many places that life thrives, as well as how it is the very living difficulties that make such a huge variety of creatures... I think there is something very spiritual about the way that life adapts to live in the hardest place, and it is that hardship that shapes the form that life takes.
Enjoy
A contest entry
- ACROSTIC! by A Murderous Lament.
375 points, ended May 8, 2007, 18 entries
• next poem in this contest, remove from contest - Anythingggggg!! by OurxBeginning.
300 points, ended May 9, 2007, 40 entries
• next poem in this contest, remove from contest
Please tell me what you think
Comments
1 - 9 of 9
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very good write
tell the truth i like it all,,,it was a very good write,, i enjoyed reading it... keep up the good work and good luck in the future with contest,,,,
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I also like and use portmanteau word combinations of my own creation, but the combinations need to work together to say something more than they would have as individual words. lavastrong and lifeskin don't work for me, but lostland works well here and has a picture that both makes sense and strengthens the poem.
I really liked your title here.
Because you chose to do an acrostic poem that also has very long lines, the few short ones like "eyes" and "ssandy desertchild" really stand out like you coped out and couldn't think of the rest of the sentence without losing a required letter position.
I get what you said about ssandy sounding like the snake, but if you're going to do it, go bigger and more obvious like Ssssandy so it's clear it isn't a typo.
With Cra Ked you could like it more obvious by using "Cra^ked"
When I was reading I didn't notice the acrostic until the end so the spacing and line differences really bothered me. I was thinking that instead of spaces between the lines you could use ---- and that way it wouldn't seem like every stanza was randomly a different length.
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I generally hate acrostics... Don't get me wrong, if they help you structure your thoughts and form, that's excellent, but they're often stilted, so _knowing_ something is an acrostic makes me look for gaps I might otherwise accept as more natural. Fortunately, I didn't recognize this as an acrostic until I was pretty much the whole way through and read the rough transitions as more of modernist play (it helps that I've been reading a lot of cummings lately).
I love the not-quite-portmanteau combinations of words in this. They create a rich sense of merger and and newness that seems perfect for the theme. The alliteration/assonance uniting them is well done, but they are also naturiginal (snakespawn/lavastrong).
Some of the suggestions I'd pose would break the acrostic (hence my reservations bout the form). The potency of certain combinations would have been enhanced for me without certain words that I thought had just crept in, but were probably intentional "Lotus river blooms/voracious/
to blind and devour my eyes." "Now growing, now failing, but / aided by strain." Etc. Same thing with the stanza breaks.
I thought the extra hissing "s" was perfectly fine, but the "Crac Ked" was just a little too obvious.
Ideational development to tie up the
title worked well. The poem was lush and texturefullish. I'd like to see the kinks worked out (either with or without sacrificing the acrostic element), but it was still a good fun read.
Brian
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I rather like the acrostic form. This one particularly speaks to me, for I live in a strange place, one would think life should not be, but does live. A place of hardship itself can lend some interesting imagery. You have demonstrated this quite well. I like the second stanza particularly, but I noticed a couple of spelling errors.
"Crac Ked dusty
Lostland, where
Into rocks whirlwinds whip and
No one sees a snakespawn
Growing; a sly
Ssandy desertchild."
The first line looked intentional, but the last line could be corrected without taking away your meaning.
Despite that, my home is like a sandy, whirlwind Lostland. My poem "Altus", should give you a clue, as to the type of place I live. No true sense of itself. A hodgepodge of throw together. Altogether, great poem, and an inspired write! Keep it up! -
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The second was also intentional... I see that you dont feel it works? it was that alliteration, but empahasised,with the double s, representing the snake sound! ill read Altus as soon as I can.
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Wonderfully done. I am a real acrostic snob and this one is perfect.
John -
This is really different and unique. It contains a lot of emotion and meaning. Thanks for entering and good luck.
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Good.
Great acrostic for not doing them in awhile. A few spelling errors I caught but those can be fixed easily. Great joB!
A MURDEROUS LAMNET <\33 -
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Thank you for commenting. I've fixed the spelling errors that I want to fix now, the other (e.g the double ss) was deliberate, as is the broken word cracked - and all of the words that have been jammed together! thanks for the comment though!
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