[Maryann Corbett]

Drought

Above our field of stunted corn and thistle,
a lone chimango circles, scouts, homes in
as sure and swift and savage as a missile,
pins down a leveret, rips away its skin,
ignores the terror-stricken eyes, the squeal,
devours the pulsing heart. His thirst now slaked,
he leaves the rest for a carancho's meal.
The land is quivering, crumbling, cracked and caked,

the stream a silent checkerboard of mud,
the well near dry. I pray this lack of water
won't leave me stony at the sight of blood,
of rational, inexorable slaughter.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Another one that I could not forget. What a lot of great writers we are privileged to have at Eratosphere.

[James Wilk]

This poem's strength is its diction and its imagery. The Spanish bird names establish the geographic setting. Each verb packs a punch. There is the delightful rhyme of "thistle" and "missile." Lastly, the trope of "checkerboard of mud" is very evocative. Worthy of a good journal.

[Susan McLean]

I remember this from when it was posted originally. I think it is very effective. It comes close enough to a sonnet that readers are likely to notice its truncated form, which echoes the theme of what is lost in times of drought. Very elegant.

Susan

[Jennifer Reeser]

What Jim wrote. Even for the sonnet, this would be about as good as it gets. I love the immediacy of the initial image, instantly setting the scene, mood. Nice binding to the violence of man in L3, though the line gets into a jog-trot rhythm there which brings the rhetoric a tad into preciousness, with the "and...and"s. Were this mine, I'd replace a couple of those single-syllables with something trochaic and a comma -- "certain, swift, and savage...", etc.

Exemplary, by-the-book maneuvering at the volta, with a powerful meditation and summation on the desensitizing process of logical, loveless Nature.

To me, one of the most striking features of this poem is the brutally strong end words employed in each line -- concrete nouns almost without exception, lending extreme weight and impetus to the poem, though I also noted the perfectly balanced admixture of the physical with the emotional and abstract/intellectual elements. Amazing work.

[Jennifer Reeser]

PS -- I have edited my remark about the sonnet, as I realized the first was unspecific, and may have led to confusion that I was categorizing this poem so. No, it's not. But it's awfully close.

JR

[W.F. Lantry]

I've never seen this one, but I have no problem guessing who wrote it. I'd recognize the grace and dexterity of those lines anywhere.

Truly stunning!

Thanks,

Bill

[Petra Norr]

Very elegantly done. A wonderful read as far as form and sounds go. And, of course, it's also a very good poem with respect to content. Which is not to say I completely understand it. For instance, I feel that a lot is riding on the word "thirst" in L6; it paves the way for the dry landscape and "lack of water" in S2 and all the associations that follow at the end of the poem. But the trouble is, the bird is not actually thirsty; it's hungry. And that's why I don't think the ending with the emphasis on lack of water works very well to create a parallel between the narrator and the bird that kills.

I pray this lack of water
won't leave me stony at the sight of blood,
of rational, inexorable slaughter.

[Jeffrey Eiland]

Maryann,
I read this post as my first here on Eratosphere, and I did not like it all.
After about an hour of browsing I came back to it, and it has discovered a niche within my heart.
The thirst everyone speaks of relates most to me like that of a vampire's. A bird of prey is going to thirst in the sense that it needs. What that need is obviously depends, in this case a meal. So the way I took the second half of the poem about the stream was one large metaphor. It seems to represent the blood flow of the leveret. The leveret itself the well, and the its lack of life and blood the drought itself. As if you were going for a metaphor within itself, and in the poem together, you achieved it.