Steer Skull
Posted in Garden Antiques on 08/11/2009 06:09 pm by adminSnowballing, criticism please?
I put a bit of blizzard
In my mittens, patting and
Packing the sticky snowflakes
Into an arctic orb, which I put down.
As if I were guiding a bowling ball
I roll the globe between two cedars,
And steer it into a clearing. It’s mass
Increasing, now something I’d bounce-pass
To a stringy man, waving his arms at half court
I roll it and grow it, until
The boulder refuses to budge,
So I ball another one, but smaller
And soon, a third, while on the horizon
Clouds drift and yawn in the orange dusk.
I stack the three-
Head, base, and body
Eyes stolen from my sister’s vest
A nose I should have fed my horse with.
And thin limbs I ripped from a tiny tree for him
I picture that child piling his snow
Molding a man, impervious to melting
Solemn and still as the February moon-
He wears like a silver jewel upon his skull.
Interesting but your breaks in the first two stanzas aren't uniform with the rest of the poem. Putting a period in the middle of the line indicates a break, but your enters after that cut the new though too short then.
All of this had to do with snow but when I read
"It’s mass
Increasing, now something I’d bounce-pass
To a stringy man, waving his arms at half court"
I suddenly pictured summer and it distorted the imagery, as basketball has a lot to do with warm weather.
You also compare the snowball to a bowling ball in that same stanza, before you say it grew to become something in the shape of a basketball. Firstly, there's no real size difference in the two, and you don't really need both ball images.
As for the good things, I loved the imagery you kept with the dusk light hitting the snow and then the reflection of the moon afterward to show the passing of time.
The second to last stanza also shows loss that comes with the happiness. This personifies winter very well as most living things go into hiding or die during that time.
The overall poem had a nice reminiscent feeling too it, rather than a physical. This was because your wording spoke of only one sense (sight) as in a memory rather than (sound, smell, touch...ect)
I enjoyed it
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