Time ended here
long long ago
where craggy points crawl
hunkered out to sea
where waves sweep ever
back and forth
over deep gray sands
thin canyon beaches
And here at the edge
of living there glides
but the long lone cry
of a seagull
skimming the deepest pangs
of his own reflection
In a list
Thoughts, Feelings, Interpretations, Experience:
Comments
1 - 57 of 57
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love it
and within the comments i like your comments about free verse and poetry form, i still have trouble, NOT rhyming but letting the words fall where they may....i like how you have penned your words here!
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It takes time, but it will happen. For me the trick has been learning to allow structure AND form, not forcing one or the other, but letting the words pick their form, or lack of it. Glad you enjoyed!
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This reminds me of skimming stones across lakes. It never took much to get the stone to glide further than my reflection, but it seemed impossible to have the stone enter and leave the water more than four times before it went further than the reflection.
I'm not a massive fan of free verse, as I keep telling people, but nice poems, like this and many others, are slowly working their way into making me appreciate this form more than I do.
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I was originally a verse-only poet. It took years of de-re-programming before I tried my hand at free verse, and eventually I decided to refine my structural capabilities as far as I could manage, then I went back to free verse again--now I write both free verse and structured poetry. What I've learned through all this, however, is that all poetry is, in fact, structured.
One of my favorite ways to write free verse is to let the first stanza fall out as it will, then pick various prosodic aspects of that first stanza that I'll use as a theme for each stanza following. These poems become what could truly be called "free form".
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Beautiful!
Wow!
I love nature. Sorry, but I am terrified of spiders. hehe. But I loved this poem and how you described the seagull. How beautiful. -
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I come back to this poem periodically to try to recapture the essence of my experience that day. I've actually altered a few minor details since you commented. Wonder if you'd notice anything different.
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i luv it!
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I'm glad it!
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Great imagery: where craggy points crawl hunkered out to sea I thought the spacing and lineation reminded me of the waves. In the next to the last line I hung up on pangs. Is there more perfect word?
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Hmm I'm not sure if there's a better word than "pangs". This is in fact the pivotal word of the entire poem. I'm curious how it is this word hangs you up. What happens within you when you come to it? Is there some confusion as to its meaning? Is it a general dislike of the word? Curious curious. Hope you'll humor me.
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I read your poem again. I think I find the sound, and not the meaning, grating compared to the rest of the poem, but my bust, maybe that's your point!!! LOL
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Ah yes! It's the harshest sounding word in the poem. It takes the beauty of the scenery described and sharply throws it off, conveying a sense of something wrong, something not actually right, something in fact illusory about the beauty. You're right on the money with your assessment. It's intended to jar the reader, to make him reflect on the deepest pangs of his own reflection, to spark an insight, that maybe we are, each and all, in fact wholly immersed in dukha.
Thanks Bruce for coming back to this and having a second look.
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Hmmm, very interesting. Why does "pangs" create that impression? I think it is because it is monosyllabic and ends in a hard "g". At any rate, the effect is quite striking.
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Superb plus
Ah, 'tis a very fine write. I like the way you have expressed your thoughts. Thanks for sharing this one with us.
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Ah yes, inspired by a place of utter peace down at the beach end of a long ravine only accessible via a 5 hour hike.
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very well written and imaginative. I enjoyed reading it; it makes me think
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Thanks!
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i really liked this one, good vision & strong progresssion.
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Thank you. Glad you liked.
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love the visual.
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Thanks. Glad you enjoyed.
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I clicked this to look at the background. It's really nice. I like it lots.
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Glad you like. If Kevin holds the place still for a few minutes I'll update more of my fracked up backgrounds to be AP compatible.
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I really liked this. I liked your choice of words and the way you portrayed your intended message.
I had to read it more than once, just because I wanted to enjoyed the imagery again.
The only thing I wasn't sure about was "long long" on the second line, it might just be as strong without the repetition. Just a thought.
Normally I'm not a fan of no punctuation in a poem, but this still read fluently.
Well done.
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Long long ago. Simplicity. Smoothness of sound. Sliding gliding vowels. Like the long white wings over the lean gray green sweeps of sea. And the wings. Their strokes are repetitive. Like karma. The mirror. The coming and going. The ever nascent sense of seeing knowing grasping the nature of it all.
Thanks for reading! And for enjoying! And for leaving your thoughts!
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This is really outstanding...great use of words to project the images into the reader's mind. The second stanza was my favorite. This really is quite good. Sorry I'm not more articulate
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No worries on articulation. I think your comment is perfectly fine. It lets me know which stanza you liked the most, and why you liked the poem as a whole. This is better than a lot of comments. Glad you enjoyed!
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an excellent poem i feel, well written and i enjoyed reading it.
And here at the end
of living there glides
but the long lone cry
of a seagull
this is my favourite part of the poem, well done, truly. -
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Thank you. Glad you enjoyed this one. I actually like to come back and read this one from time to time for some reason. Puts me back at the place I was when I wrote it. There are some moments in life I wish I could freeze and exist in forever.
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excellent
Hello Zahhar....excellent indeed.
Rahbar.
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Thank you, Sir.
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I'm feelin' you
sometimes when I find one of those quiet places / my spirit jumps to a creature of nature...& I can almost see and feel what they feel. Something similar to our neighbors, the indiginous Indian / before we stole his Spirit, polluted his sky & trampled his sacred sites.
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Well, in a way, we're all indigenous Indians now. I posted something here a long time ago titled "Legacy", which tried to express this.
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this is the kind of poem I like to write "And here at the end/ of living there glides / but the long lone cry/ of a seagull" -- my favorite stanza. You captured the feeling of staring out to see. Beautiful.
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Aye yes these kinds of poems can be nice to work on. Meditative.
Thanks for stopping in!
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Well done use of line brakes and placement
simulating wave movement. Mostly I'm trying to recognize where this might be. From the imagery I would guess the coast of Oregon, however, the description sounds as if the area was formed by volcanic activity or a meteor strike given the "end of living". I disagree with another's comment about the combining of hunker and crawl. I think one must hunker down on the belly in order to crawl. At least that's how I proceed. For me the most evocative line and my favorite is; "a gull skimming the deepest pangs of
his own reflection". Such desolate loneliness is expressed in those lines. In all his world for all his time the only company he shall ever have is his own image. Maybe: eons ago, L2. Where hunkered craggy points crawled out to sea L3-4, grinding sand for over sand in L7. Return the favor? -
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Ah well now, let's see if I can do this. Okay, it's a wee spot called Jackass Creek, along the Lost Coast of Sinkyone National Forest, in Northern California.
Yes it was while watching the gull skim the waters that I found myself jotting down the first draft for this poem. Such lonesome figures there on the waves, wings almost touching the water in flight.
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great job
wow, that's full of imagery ^^ i love it. congrats.
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Glad you enjoyed!
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Very nice write, good poetic devises - alliteration, assonance, imagery. The indentation made me see the pattern of waves. The form is almost a sonnet, and very effective for this short piece. I hesitated on 'long long ago' somehow the repetition felt wrong, a bit cliched. I also stopped on the use together of 'crawl' and 'hunker'; can't do both. I liked the image of 'the end of living', it emphasised the desolation of the scene. Well done.
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I tried a couple of alternatives to "long long ago" when I pieced this together, but none of them felt right, and I wanted to fill this poem with soft sounds, and simple words and repetitions--except in reference to the jagged points, which I felt could use some abruptness.
"crawl" and "hunkered" couldn't be done at once by a human, but maybe by a large lumbering creature. Picture a thunderhead over plains, which hunkers near the earth and crawls along. I got a similar impression from the way the points hunkered out and crawled into the sea. It was a fun experiment with words, either way.
Thanks for your thoughts, pania. Hope to hear from you again sometime.
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Oh yes very much so. I kept finding different things everytime i read. =D
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wow!
this was a beautiful piece! >.< i love the depth in your words! amazing!
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Glad you enjoyed. )
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WOW!!! i love this. I must have read it at least 10 times. really enjoyed this for real!
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Ooh cool! Did you find your interpretation of the poem changing-evolving as you reread?
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Great!
I liked the way you structured the stanzas, with every other line indented. It made the poem easier to follow by breaking things up a little bit. I was wondering if the alliteration you used was intentional. It really added a lot to this piece. I especially liked the pairing of "long" and "lone." Good word choice. -
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Aye, the alliteration there was intentional. Inspired by something Tennyson wrote, actually.
Glad you enjoyed!
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This was very well arranged. I thought of the earth, folding in within itself. A past that can not be escaped through the reflection.
Bravo!
Criss -
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Not escaped, and yet often ignored. Sometimes it seems to me that we are the reflection of our karma, and that karma is perpetuated by the actions of this reflection, which further changes its shape. We walk through a house of mirrors, and the mirrors reflect mind in a trillion trillion ways.
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very nice picture perfect
what caught my attention was the ocean
I love the ocean
I love the descriptions here and the sounds by the water that I can feel as I read
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That was a nice short poem... well shorter then mine are usually... really good job... later..
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It felt at first like a glance at an album, with one picture bringing the author to memory lane. But visiting places is very much like glancing an album, right? There will always be places that would remind us important milestones or even painful lessons in our lives, as much as there are events that mark a particular era in our lifetime.
This one feels like a visit to where an era of life ended. I am curious if it was that era that was difficult, or if it was letting go. Maybe, both? The “long lone cry of a seagull skimming the deepest pangs of his own reflection,” also gives a sense he still finds himself in that part of his past.
This sounded sad. Yet, no amount of sad tone could hide the beauty of this picture and the brilliance of this poem. Gorgeous words. Stunning imagery.
I just hope that the seagull would realize that it is also time to end his skimming. It is time to fly. And I’m sure up there, he will see his true reflection in people whose lives he has inspired because of his daring.
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This is a very interesting analogy. I liked how you put the seagull lonely cry in. Because I would agree he sees his reflection in the waters of the ocean below.
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This reminds me of a glance behind...something i wrote i don't know when..
"And here at the end
of living there glides
but the long lone cry
of a seagull"
Now that I think about it the sound of seagulls is a lonely sound...it's beautiful but lonely.
"Time ended here
long long ago
where craggy points crawl
hunkered out to sea"
I am not sure I can get the image with the word hunkered...it throws me off a bit..
Kay Laon Anders
Great write of course...
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Loved it. It has such a tremor of the primordial. I am very much into this theme. Bravo.
" skimming the deepest pangs
of his own reflection"
Gives an ambiance of melancholy to the existance of the thing. Does it suck to be a seagull?
Juxtaposes the essence of the eternal and transient.
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