From a morning flight's window,
Things look simple.
Happiness down there is easy
To imagine.
Field squares look clean and neat
And my finger tip can connect rivers and lakes.
Mountains look like pimples
On earth's greasy face
And clouds seem close enough
To be coaxed to cry anytime.
The first pinch of bathos, perhaps,
Will be a failed bargain with an auto driver.
5 comments:
Hi
Well done. But may I add?
An Airy View
From a plane's morning window
happiness down there is easy
to imagine.
Things look simple.
etc.
The first pinch of pathos
will be my failed bargain with the auto driver.
0. Title - 'aerial' too literal perhaps? 'Airy' possibly gives a sense of both 'up in the air' as literally in a plane AND a 'take-it-or-leave it' or 'yeah, you've thought of it too, but here's my verse'; also a sense of irony, knowing you will descend.
1. Perhaps more 'definite' personalised experience all round to will better keep with 'is' rather than the 'may be' you use already
2. Somehow I find 'flight' is too tight a word... and possessive can be dropped or shifted for poetic flow - how about 'Through/from a plane's morning/dawning window'?
3. Wud switch lines 2 & 3 - as the focus then shifts to 'happiness' vs unhappiness of 'failed bargain; rather than 'simple' versus 'complexity' of bargain, as, if we are honest to ourselves, failure is simple, success is more complicated/complex, no?
4. wud prefer 'pathos' over 'bathos':
i) since you use 'cry' in the previous line and it is connected with pathos - as if implying 'I would cry before the clouds do'
ii) 'bathos' is a word not too many relate to - and it is harsher than it needs to be
ii) it is not like the 'aeriel views' were 'sublime' (in your own estimation) or that a physical descent down the stairs to the road is a particularly, radically opposed event (as 'bathos' seems to imply)
iii) 'pinch of pathos' alliterates nicely -
iv) I know I could cry bargaining with auto drivers
2. In the last two lines, to make the road-level 'reality' hit harder, would be more definite, drop 'perhaps' and use the possessive 'my' failed bargain with the auto driver' - given a sense of repetitiveness of our possibly flights of imagination and how we go yet to our daily work-a-day lives!
This is not the kind of comment one posts on blogs? Oops, forgive a maiden foray!
But thanks - twas fun to read this, and your other poems. keep writing! best wishes.
Ha ha! Thanks for the comments. Strangely, I had considered almost everyone of your suggestions while and after writing the piece!
In a larger sense, being literal, speaking almost literally and in a casual, conversational prose, is what I am aiming at. And if the metaphoric and the poetic do land up with any sense of definition, I fell like calling attention to them in an exaggerated way. And that sometimes happen to me when i make them literal and mundane.
Thanks for picking on the bathos/sublime/ pathos: but the speaker protests the change because his idea of saying "bathos" was to suggest, in his levity, that he has had a sublime experience and is going to land soon into bathos.
I am going to lap up your suggestion to use the possessive "my bargain with..." and be more definite about the nature of the forthcoming experience!
Thanks!
Actually, I am going to incorporate the suggestions and see what they do. I need to do this with pencil and paper! Tonight!
True - who is is to say when a sublime moment hits or is to anyone. I perhaps overstepped - but it was to do with the poem - and I thought it is a 'pity' that we have to come down and face the world all too soon! Hence pathos - like we shd sympathise with anyone coming down from a 'high'! Best and thanks. P.S. I don't know how to come back to blogs, except when i stumble on them. will keep yours open for sometime but forgive me if I get lost and don't return (bookmarks are just too many on my computer to track - RSS including!)
I really appreciate your dropping in and talking to me. I do hope you do not get lost. :)
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