A frozen Mole

27 below IS cold, yeah.

I can see the haiku influence in the spareness and natural setting.

Welcome, Cinderwolf!

Welcome Cinderwolf.
The Frozen Mole took several readings for me--I am not an experienced writer either and my criticisms are only perceptions.
What I liked about the frozen mole was the care and worry you had for his life. It was so human and depicted what is good about being human, that you can care for a mole, with so much needless death going on in the world. You haven't lost your humanity--thank heaven.

The second poem is so existential, that it will take someone much more knowledgeable than I to critique it for you.

Thank you, i really really am happy you got something out of it. The story with the mole is true, my cousin was digging a trench with a backhoe(heavy machinery) and after one scoop their was this little bundle of wet fur i didnt know what to do with it, their was 4 feet of frost in the ground we could hardly dig through it, snow covered the ground so i couldnt find a hole for him. every one was mad at me for carrying him around in my pocket eventually i had to let him go in some loose stuff we dug up, he dug in and i dont know what happen to him.

Cinderwold, I'm so glad you tried. It takes on much more meaning in this time of war.

Welcome to A2K, Cinderwolf.
Your style of writing is to poetry, what stream of consciouness is to prose.
Although I loved the mole poem, I was particularly taken with your second poem. Like a string of coral beads, each word was linked to the other reflecting untamable facets of nature in which we often find ourselves alone and unknown. Perhaps nature moves, and we stand still,eh.

Unfortunately, my dear, you probably didn't pass your poetry units in school because your instructors were from a different school of thought.

Cinderwolf === reading your poems was a pleasure. I like the sharpness of 2 or 3 word lines. The way you write is like a hammer striking a very firm blow, making us pay attention. So keep on writing, let the words flow and be proud of them.

I write or try to write a variety of things in different styles. Poems, esays, short stories. The reason for writing is simply to enjoy myself and if others like reading the results then that's great. A number of people have.

Good luck to you Cinderwolf

The replys are helpful and very much apprechiated. i have a pile more that ive writen the last year, i will find a few that i like fix them up a bit and post them sometime. thank you

I enjoyed your poems. My thoughts are reflected in comments above: ie. your feeling for a helpless creature, the spare, crisp style . . .

keep writing, keep sharing,

Hello.

I just wanted to say that I very much enjoyed your poem. It reminded me of a time, oh gosh, years back, when I found a rat near the river that runs by my cricket club. The poor thing was dying for some reason (no doubt paralysed by paraquat) and clearly was in some pain. In my young mind I felt I had to make a decision: do I leave the animal to suffer or do I help it on its way by bashing it over the head with a shovel? That, by the way, is what I eventually did. Bang! Bang! Now, I am no expert in dispatching rats so taking from the creature the little life it had left was difficult. It was also difficult because it seemed to me to be an extremely unpleasant thing to do. Your poem suggested to me that 'putting it out of its misery' - a human sentiment which masquerades as compassion - was not my real motive but that, perhaps, the motive was to eradicate this unseamly vision of suffering. Empathy can be a negative - even violent - attribute. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, even when one is convinced that one's motives are, in fact, noble, is a dangerous road to take.

All this waffle is meant to show you that poetry stimulates parts of the audience's mind that other linguistic forms simply cannot. Poetry is hardwired language - essentialised communication. Yours is as fine example of that fact as any.

mr tips, i find your post very interesting. my poem doesnt come even close to the things that went through my mind, iam not that great of a poet actually no one is but i wish that i could have expressed more, but i guess it works as a starting point of thought or discousion. i have thought alot about digging up that mole, its was very confusing/interesting, i really dont know what i learned about myself or others. The land owner was totally unconserned, he said that where he used to live he had to get them exterminated because they where a nucianse, so he might have to be killed anyway, alot of confusion. what i was feeling was that i caused this, i dug him up so really i was rsponsible. but you cant stop working, everything we do effects everything and everyone, the only way we are not effecting other people or things in a negative way is by not existing. it was actually unbelievably amazing that he survived being dugg up with a 400 pound bucket in the first place, he was just sitting there on the bottom of the trench shivvering. then when i picked it up i was facinated by its beady eyes, it was so beutiful. it was a living creature and i felt how fragile its life was and hence how fragile my life and life in general really is. but what could i do with it? bring it to the spca? i was working far away from anycity, there really isnt any place that would take him and even if they did what kind of a life is living in a cage? i would have loved to take him home but i cant take care of a mole, i was renting a room they wouldnt have alowed a furry creature to live in their house anyway. my mind was flipping through a lot of different possibilitys of what to do and in the end i had to let him go i felt that the best thing to do was to let the situation follow its natural course from here, wheather that be evolution, God, or just luck, i just had to "wash my hands" of its fate, i realized that i am unauthorized? of controlling its fate. i couldnt kill it, but i really already had by digging it up. to most people its just a mole but to me it deals with situations and questions in life that are far beyond our understanding or control. questions about what it means to be alive and to be human and choices.

I like what you say. It takes a sensitive person to realise the scale of the burden and responsibility of power. And that's what it is: power. The creature; the moment is just a symbol of that fact.