Tiger Lillies

A Poem by jc

1000 pounds of atmosphere

hangs around me

and the sun is at full brightness

children scuttle off of their busses

for the final time this summer

joy and exuberance fills the air

and maybe i’d be able to feel the lightness

of it

if the atmosphere didn’t weigh 1000lbs

maybe if i could mount my rusty schwinn

like the trusty steed she was to me

at 9 years old

and glide down the park hill

my only care in the world,

keeping my tires straight

maybe if this hole i’ve started digging

was for an innocent bed of flowers

lilacs and hydrangeas and tiger lillies

regardless

there is a familiar fondness

of it all

with this 1000lbs atmosphere

and the laughter of children

and digging in the garden

maybe if i could feel it all first hand

once more

i could put down this shovel

and unload my gun

© 2022 jc

My Review

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Reviews

willweb

Well, I liked it, regardless of if someone else did or not. I like your style. I like how you pour your darkest and deepest feelings onto a page for all to see. The 1000 lbs of atmosphere was very cool and very clever. Sometimes it does feel like that. The weight is almost unbearable but somehow it seems you have survived it and I hope you continue on the path. Keep writing, find the healing power of spilling your guts out in poetry. I loved this, even though dark, I could feel this.

Posted 1 Year Ago

JayG

• 1000 pounds of atmosphere hangs around me and the sun is at full brightness

You’ve given them what seems to be a weather status report. So I have to ask: What’s in it for the reader? It's meaningful to you, who have context for what you're referring to, but you give the reader none.

This is you talking about what’s happening in your neighborhood—which seems to be on a planet with a much higher gravity then Earth's to give such a high barometer reading.

In all of your poetry, it’s you talking about things meaningful to you, without ever giving the reader context. Here, for example, though you mention the atmospheric pressure over and over you never give reason for doing it. And though you seem to mean that the speaker feels as if there’s a huge weight on them, the atmosphere, because it presses equally everywhere is not felt as a weight, no matter how it increases. And I say that as a scuba diver who’s had multiple time’s normal atmospheric pressure around him, often.

But that aside, because you never give the reason for that pressure, and what it represents, all you’re saying in the end, is: Things for others are normal. But I feel really pressured, for unspecified reasons.

My point? Stop telling the reader how YOU feel. Poetry isn't meant to report, it entertains the reader by providing an emotional experience. Nonfiction tells the reader that someone cried at a funeral. Poetry makes the READER weep.

Choose your words well and you have the power to make people you’ll never meet feel all the human emotions at your command. Make your reader weep and they’ll thank you. Make them feeltriumphant and they’ll praise you. Tell them how you feel and they’ll yawn.

The thing is, they’ve been developing the skills of writing poetry for centuries. But we’re given none of them in school because unless you work for a greeting card company, employers don’t want poetry from us. They want the reports and essays we spent our school-days learning how to write.

So dig into the specialized tricks of the profession we call poetry and make them work for you. Acquire the skills that the pros take for granted. A great place to begin is with Mary Oliver’s, A Poetry Handbook. Everyone hoping to write poetry should read it.

You can download a free, readable copy at the address below, though in the end, you’ll probably want a hard copy of your own.
https://yes-pdf.com/book/1596

I know you were hoping for a lot more flattering response than this, but I noticed that you’re not getting the responses you might hope for, and since we’ll not address the problem we don’t see as being one, I thought you might want to know.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

Posted 1 Year Ago

• 1000 pounds of atmosphere hangs around me and the sun is at full brightness

You’ve given them what seems to be a weather status report. So I have to ask: What’s in it for the reader? It's meaningful to you, who have context for what you're referring to, but you give the reader none.

This is you talking about what’s happening  in your neighborhood—which seems to be on a planet with a much higher gravity then Earth's to give such a high barometer reading.

In all of your poetry, it’s you talking about things meaningful to you, without ever giving the reader context. Here, for example, though you mention the atmospheric pressure over and over you never give reason for doing it. And though you seem to mean that the speaker feels as if there’s a huge weight on them, the atmosphere, because it presses equally everywhere is not felt as a weight, no matter how it increases. And I say that as a scuba diver who’s had multiple time’s normal atmospheric pressure around him, often.

But that aside, because you never give the reason for that pressure, and what it represents, all you’re saying in the end, is: Things for others are normal. But I feel really pressured, for unspecified reasons.

My point? Stop telling the reader how YOU feel. Poetry isn't meant to report, it entertains the reader by providing an emotional experience. Nonfiction tells the reader that someone cried at a funeral. Poetry makes the READER weep.

Choose your words well and you have the power to make people you’ll never meet feel all the human emotions at your command. Make your reader weep and they’ll thank you. Make them feeltriumphant and they’ll praise you. Tell them how you feel and they’ll yawn.

The thing is, they’ve been developing the skills of writing poetry for centuries. But we’re given none of them in school because unless you work for a greeting card company, employers don’t want poetry from us. They want the reports and essays we spent our school-days learning how to write.

So dig into the specialized tricks of the profession we call poetry and make them work for you. Acquire the skills that the pros take for granted. A great place to begin is with Mary Oliver’s, A Poetry Handbook. Everyone hoping to write poetry should read it.

You can download a free, readable copy at the address below, though in the end, you’ll probably want a hard copy of your own.
https://yes-pdf.com/book/1596

I know you were hoping for a lot more flattering response than this, but I noticed that you’re not getting the responses you might hope for, and since we’ll not address the problem we don’t see as being one, I thought you might want to know.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

Rating /100