05-27-2020, 10:46 AM
edit1;
Last night I watched a cockroach vainly dash
through frantic circuits in a plastic trash
receptacle with sides too slick and new
to climb. I thought of things that I could do:
spray in some poison, crush it with a shoe,
or tip the bin outside and let it book
for home on moonless grass. Instead I took
no action; by this morning it had died.
Could I have helped? Perhaps I should have tried.
Thanks to both critics. In this edit I've mainly applied @JaggedEdge's recommendation to try it with rhyme. Frankly, I don't like the result quite as well, but await others' take on it. In particular, the last line gives away too much, as I see it. I did not do any trimming (per @Knot) - hard enough to preserve everything else while applying rhyme! Maybe next edit.
@JaggedEdge - in answer to your question about L.4, the double space after a period is intentional, but almost not (that is, it's instinctive). When I was learning to type in the 1960s, we were taught to insert two spaces after a period (or colon), one after a comma or semicolon. That's just the way it was, we were graded down if we didn't. I remember our fastest typist missed out on a record speed run because she spaced only once after a period. To this day, I hit the space bar twice after period and colon; when WordPerfect™ "corrects" it to one space, I correct it right back.
Last night I watched a cockroach vainly dash
through frantic circuits in a plastic trash
receptacle with sides too slick and new
to climb. I thought of things that I could do:
spray in some poison, crush it with a shoe,
or tip the bin outside and let it book
for home on moonless grass. Instead I took
no action; by this morning it had died.
Could I have helped? Perhaps I should have tried.
Thanks to both critics. In this edit I've mainly applied @JaggedEdge's recommendation to try it with rhyme. Frankly, I don't like the result quite as well, but await others' take on it. In particular, the last line gives away too much, as I see it. I did not do any trimming (per @Knot) - hard enough to preserve everything else while applying rhyme! Maybe next edit.
@JaggedEdge - in answer to your question about L.4, the double space after a period is intentional, but almost not (that is, it's instinctive). When I was learning to type in the 1960s, we were taught to insert two spaces after a period (or colon), one after a comma or semicolon. That's just the way it was, we were graded down if we didn't. I remember our fastest typist missed out on a record speed run because she spaced only once after a period. To this day, I hit the space bar twice after period and colon; when WordPerfect™ "corrects" it to one space, I correct it right back.
Non-practicing atheist