Halcyon

[Marc]

A sleight of blue

crossing a dark pool
clouded with lilies,
carp concealing,
overhung by
hawthorn and birch?

Perhaps where a quiet river
curls gently through a
cow poached meadow
seeking the slow death
of an oxbow lake?

Or maybe captured
in a house of marbles
hanging on a cord
to dive forever
over goldfish jigsaws?

I would take you to see it;
to walk where it flew.
The azure would delight
your eyes, the orange warm
the palette of your heart.

I saw a kingfisher
but I can't tell you
where.
And doubtless
it's no longer
there.

[Arian]

I like this, marc, but it took me a few reads to make it smooth in my head. I stumbled a few times on (to me) unusual word usages.

Take, for example, the participle 'concealing'. The way it's used seems to demand a verb object (what is it concealing?)...but then I twigged that you mean (I think) concealed. Hidden. Maybe you'd do better to keep it simple here? I could be wrong, of course, but even if so, I still think concealing confuses rather than clarifies.

And 'cow poached' - I was thinking, why would a cow poach...? The simple expedient of a hyphen (cow-poached) would fix that.

And there were a couple of other things.

In the main, though, I think it's captured a real mood, and I like it.

I do think, and I'm not one of your inveterate minimalists by nature, that the last 2 stanzas work pretty well on their own. Even just the last stanza is nice (and the best, for me, in the piece).

Cheers
peter

[Marc]

Hi Peter and thanks.

I'm saying "...the pond, clouded with lilies and carp concealing..." but perhaps it's not coming across like that. Will think about it.

The cows are poaching the field -poaching being the term used when a muddy field has livestock on it - it becomes poached.

Hope these help and glad the last stanza works ok

Best wishes
Marc