Where the Lions Weep

[Wotan]

I don't post my own stuff in this forum all that often, simply because I'm really busy IRL.
  However, I thought some of you might enjoy this piece.  I also tend to avoid aa,bb rhyming structure in most of my pieces, because I've always felt that most of the time, it just comes across as clunky and pedantic.  However, I used it in this particular piece, just because I felt it happened to work with the particular meter and flow.  Enjoy!

  WHERE THE LIONS WEEP - by Trevor Patrick (Wotan)

  Tonight I pray for healing sleep,
  To journey to the place where the lions weep
  They weep for their loss, and our species so blind,
  And the knowledge of the day when we ran out of time.

  Brother lyon embodying the sun,
  While we always claimed to be the chosen ones.
  His salty tears fall to drown all our sins,
  To wait for the time he can hunt again.

  The sun and the water, earth, air, and fire,
  His ever-seeing love, man's selfish desire.
  He fathered his pride while man spilled his seed,
  And covered his land with the stains of our greed.

  Now his blood fills the land of the sun and his birth,
  And we are the weak, who have stolen the earth.

  When will we ever learn?
 

[Nexus]

I really like it Wotan! Great job, very emotional.

I'd work on the rhyming though. Blind + Time and Sins + Again.

Other than that, It's great.

[Gracewolf]

Very nice. The slant rhymes didn't bother me at all; I actually prefer the break from the sort of drone that tends to show up with this sort of rhyme scheme. There are a couple rhymes that seem, to me, very generic or common, but that's probably the two years of poetry classes talking.

[Nexus]

Oh it doesn't bother me either I just think that majority of the poem was being rhymed so it seemed slightly out of pace.

Are you serious? 2 years of poetry? I need you to help me with my homework soon... xD

[Gracewolf]

Haha, yeah. Until recently I was planning on being a creative writing major, so lots of poetry and short stories. Helped that my teacher was probably the most positive person on the planet; tends to happen a lot with the fine arts types...

[Wotan]

Thanks to both of you for your kind complements.  Especially Gracewolf, coming from another poet.
  Like I said at the outset, I don't necessarily consider this to be among my best work, but it was one of those pieces that just felt right and fit right as I did it.
  I'm sure you can understand.
 
  The other thing was that because I normally have some degree of antipathy for the aa,bb rhyming structure, the few pieces I've written that use it tend to among my shortest, simply because once they get longer than about twice or thrice the length of a Clerihew, they tend to start to sound like a love letter from Dr. Seuss. 

[JTWhitewolf]

Do you play any intruments? You should make that into a song. Great stuff!

[Wotan]

I 'sort of' play guitar, and I can play piano/keyboards.  However, the last actual 'song' I wrote (complete with music) was the Feral Song back in 2000.  My musical creativity seems to have pretty much shrivelled up and blown away since then, I'm afraid.  If someone else wants to try and put the words to music, I have no problem with that, as long as they respect my copyright on the lyrics.
 
 Thanks for the compliments. 

[bloodredruby]

The visuals this presents are quite nice, and I (personally) enjoyed the less than perfect rhymes; blind with time, sin and again, it breaks up the see with me, there with bear kind of exact rhyming that can get so tedius with an aabb type of poem. (I also get bored with those relatively quickly, Wotan. ^^)

The only part about this poem that throws me off is the syllable useage, ie, how it differs from stanza to stanza. For example, this is the syllable useage of your poem.

8
11
11
13

10
11
10
10

11
12
10
11

12
11

For me personally, it makes it harder to find a rythem in the poem.

Other than that, I enjoyed reading it. I particularly liked the wording of

stains of our greed

[Wotan]

Thanks, Ms. Calico.
  I appreciate your input.

  Yes, I do have a tendency to play a bit loosey-goosey with the prosody in many of my pieces, using catalexis and substitution.  However, I have read this piece for an audience at the Feral Poetry Corner a couple of times over the years, and I can assure you that it's fairly easy to recite.
  For structured (strophic) poetry, I've been influenced greatly by the works of William Wilfrid Campbell, and he was always a bit casual with his meter.

  For non-structured work, my three biggest faves were always D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, and Allen Ginsberg.

[bloodredruby]

Anytime. I'm just glad that you didn't take offense at my critique.

I admire that you can play with the rythem of your poetry; I find myself unable (or unwilling) to do so, and it restricts my writing somewhat. But I just cannot bring myself to break the meter of my writing up, so it tends to get a touch monotonus, and I tend to favor structured poetry to read as well.

Call me generic, but the poet that influenced me most was none other than Mr. Edgar Allen Poe.
Cliche, I know. 

[Wotan]

Nothing wrong with Poe.  Poe wrote lots of classic poetry, and is an excellent example of how most great poets tend to have a gimmick.  In Poe's case, it was his generous use of alliteration.

  With regards to taking offense at a critique:  That's actually a very serious faux-pas on this forum.  It says right in the rules that if you take part in the artistic sub-fora, you have to be prepared to give constructive criticism, and if you post your pieces, unless you clearly state otherwise, it is assumed that you are soliciting honest, constructive crits.
  I think it's a very important rule, because it tends to avoid a lot of 'wounded artiste' routines, and general emo butthurt.

[bloodredruby]

Yeah, I read that rule, and I am quite grateful for it. Just because it is a rule, though, doesn't necessarily mean that some people won't get snotty over constructive critisism, which is why I added my remark.

I've had alot of experience on a different style of forum, and I've seen just how butthurt people can get, so I just wanted to cover my bases as a noob on this board and make sure I didn't piss off the members or the powers that be.

I'm an overly-cautious house cat. 

[DogboyShugo]

I quite like words and the emotion that comes from the poem ^^.

[Wotan]

Thank you.

  I'm glad that you liked it.