Poetry / In Babylon
Nebuchadnezzar newspaper prophecy
and the border forks of the Arvand Rud
where silt and blood come to tears,
came soaked in the shock of large fires
extinguished like birthday candles.
Tin-can drummers
paced the moments the heart beat in madness
as a fixture-ornament in chaos’ spiraled book.
Soothsayers and bone throwers
see recurrence through multiplicity.
They see the harmonic tremors of the Sumerian promise.
Heaven like fish food,
for which we rise and fall,
is the bait encoded in the first human word
and its evolution never explained its own impasse
other than the winter hem over fallen fruit
when season press their own wine,
and the fermentation of New Year’s Eve
turns as pagan green as the midnight
of one swift arrow into the wilderness.
The End is near a mountain cut without hands,
ablaze with only the sound of fire and rain cracking,
where it’s easy to have dignity in the face of flowers
at the distance of a lion’s sneeze.
Treat it as “bless you,” with a single bass-drum nod
and outsmart God into thinking the insane are brave,
when insanity merely inspires it.
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In the first stanza, you can use come or you can use came, but both creates a confusion of time and space. Pick a tense and stick with it. You continue to have a tendency to flip flop. Fix the past/present tense issues.
Birthday candles does not go with the other imagery you have used here, so it takes the reader out of the emotional context you created.
seasons press their own wine,
or
a season presses its own wine,
Fix the plural/singular tense issue.
I can’t say this enough. Read your poem out loud. many parts of this poem become long and unweildy
Example:
is the bait encoded in the first human word
and its evolution never explained its own impasse
other than the winter hem over fallen fruit
when season press their own wine,
I found this part was especially hard to do in one breath. It becomes rushed, so try to slow it down.
It is very hard to determine what is going on. The tense issues are the biggest flaw and create the most confusion. There are some great images here like “Heaven like fish food,” and “the distance of a lion’s sneeze”. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the common thread that binds all these thoughts together. This poem needs a little more specificity. All the characters are vague and indistiguishable. I would rather see a tin-can drummer. Describe him.
What are you trying to do with this poem anyway?
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rather dense, but i like this a lot. i think there are a few minor places where i would tighten things up to make it flow a little smoother, but there’s not really much that needs to be done to this poem.
First, try combining stanzas 3 and 4; stanza 4 isn’t strong enough right now to stand on it’s own and starts out with repetition. Consider this:
Soothsayers and bone throwers
see recurrence through multiplicity.
Harmonic tremors of the Sumerian promise.
Next, the first 6 lines of stanza 4, i’d either drop the second line, and or cut some dead weight in the third and fourth like this:
bait encoded, the first human word
evolution never explaining it’s own impasse
maybe create a stanza here, and “other than the” is too much dead weight as well. it should aslo be “seasons press.”
The end I like, though I really wish it wasn’t capitalized. Makes it too final. Good poem though, just needs some minor adjustments.
This is a remarkable poem. It seems to be about ancient prophecy and the futility of religion. I love some of your word play: multiplicity and recurrence, chaos’ spiralled book, Heaven like fish food…bait. I enjoyed this journey - the modern middle east from the ancient’s perspective. Beautiful.
(PS check the word “season” but don’t erase my review this time)
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