Llanbwchllyn Lake

[ray]

Thanks, Rachel. My man wouldn't enjoy the solitude, that's why he's ending the sentence.

Ok so I've obviously missed the point of your poem. 0_0

So why did you write "This is what life could be like without you", and since the man said "without you", I presume he's talking about the girl???

I'm so confused.

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Please tell me he doesn't want to live with the girl. It would make for such a funny and better poem. And besides, you can't end your poem on a serious note with the word manfully. Come on. xD

He doesn't want to live with the girl.

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White and yellow water-lilies framing
sky upon its surface; sun and moon
fragmented, swept off to the edges.

there is an odd tense confusion here created by the contrast of framing/fragmented. This is also a sentence fragment. As a reader, I am left wondering why the narrator mentions this in the beginning of the poem as it is never tied in. It is also strange when you skip articles sometimes and not others.

Above us in the heather a cluster
of wild horses flash their tails at flies
in the flattening heat. A bird of prey circles,

flattening heat is good. "Above us in the heather" . . . ahh, a poem about a family of bugs. I do love a good bug poem. I don't know about "flash" with tails, while I love inventive usage, this one feels wrong.

swoops and arouses maternal concern
for the children below; nakedness splashes
the dignity of mallards and mute swans.

"bird of prey"? You recognised the flora but not the fauna? Why not an egret, a falcon, a kestrel? "maternal concern" is just tell and prosaic at that. "nakedness splashes"? Nakedness is just a condition it can't splash. This would be like "handsomeness splashes".

Deep in the night the call of the screech owl,
stars as large as her eyes.

more sentence fragments.

“This is what life could be like…” she whispered,
“…without you,” I manfully ended her sentence.

What you have here is a ton of scene setting and no plot. I don't know your narrator and their companion other than that they might be bugs.

As a whole, this is very, very loose. It needs some sever triage with a direction toward intent, narrative train and grammar as well as word usage to succeed.

Thanks for posting.

Milo - I think you've a good point about too much scene setting and too little plot. However, when someone can pretend not to understand "above us in the heather" so as to make witty remarks about bug poems, I sense a sneerer and if I wanted PFFA-type comments, I'd go there.