[RCL]

Rev 2 (accidentally erased Rev 1)

Totem Bird

My birth month has a totem bird
with wide wingspan and gripping claws.
At first it simply seems absurd.
An earthbound man, unlike a bird,
my flights are mental, free from laws,
without wingspan or gripping claws,
but in a way I'm like the bird:
Launched for prey, the perfect word.


Totem Bird

He hears his birth month has a totem bird
with wide wingspan and gripping sharpened claws.
At first it seems just silly and absurd,
but learning that his birth month has a bird
suggesting he’s not always self-assured,
he compares ideal heights with earthly flaws,
soon confident the eagle is his bird:
Both fly for prey when sprung by sharpened claws.

L8: for prey replaces from earth

https://a-z-animals.com/blog/12-birt...rd-symbolizes/

[Yves S L]

Hello Ralph,

General thoughts: So there are billions of humans and twelve months each with a totem bird that might be given personality traits. Now anything can spark a transformation, but if the poem was a movie, then the transformation based on the luck of which month you are born in would be, to me, a hard sell.

But hey ho that is my issue with premise, that the character change is not well "motivated". But my perspective might change on another day.

Thinking about it some more: it comes down to my feeling that the final two lines are too emphatically clark-kent-to-superman heroic, that a smaller transformation, maybe even some doubt would sell the transformation more:

he compares ideal heights with earthly flaws/not confident the eagle is his bird and so on.

There is no reason why a totem bird might not be a some kind Rorschach inkblot test, but can a Rorschach inkblot test spark a thorough polaric shift of life-long personality traits and described in so few lines? The poem seems to be a bit too easily set up.

[David Elliot Eisenstat]

A loose triolet. Like Yves, I’m not sold on the transformation; it seems overly compressed.

With only five different lines in the strict form, syllables are—by my lights—at a premium, and too many of these are spent on rhetoric. But for formal constraints, L3 could lose “at first”, “just”, and “silly” without compromising the meaning. L5’s “suggesting” and “always” seem inefficient.

[Jayne Osborn]

Hi Ralph,
For me, the stress lands on he compares ideal heights with earthly flaws which doesn't sound right to my ear.

I wonder whether it could be his ideal heights compare with earthly flaws ?

Jayne

[Christine P'legion]

Ralph, I'm afraid that I mostly find this poem confusing.

Ls4 and 5 are not clear to me. Is it the bird that suggests he isn't self-assured? (And how would a bird suggest that, exactly? Doesn't an eagle seem more like the opposite of that?) Or is it that the act of learning that his birth month has a bird somehow suggests that lack of assurance to him? I've read it through several times and I'm still trying to parse it.

Why does learning his bird-horoscope suggests he's not always confident make him confident? The "he compares ideal heights with earthly flaws" bit is the through-line there but I'm not following the logic.

I'm also not sure about the last line. Is an eagle "sprung" from its claws when it dives for prey? From its wings, rather, I should think. The claws are being propelled in front.

[RCL]

Yves, David, Jayne and Christine, thanks for optimistically trying to make sense of this. I’m trying again with this latest version, which is perhaps closer to what I was hoping for.

[Christine P'legion]

Hi Ralph, I think this version is much better.

I would suggest changing the comma at the end of your penultimate line into a colon.

You've got some variation in the meter which hiccups a bit to my ear, namely the extra syllable in L4, the missing syllable in L8, and the extra two in L6. I think most of those could be smoothed away quite easily with some minor adjustments to word choice.

Your meaning is much clearer in this version!

[David Callin]

Hi Ralph. I think I'm with Christine here. If you could smooth out the metric hiccups in lines 4 and 6 - not that I'm necessarily a fan of unalloyed smoothness - I think it would hit the reader more effectively.

Cheers

David

[RCL]

Christine, thanks again! Your suggestions are apt and adopted.

David, good to hear from you that it can be improved.

[Julie Steiner]

Hi, Ralph!

The second quatrain in the traditional triolet recipe is abAB, with capitals for the repetends. You're making it bBAB, which makes you repeat "claws" more than you need to.

Not that you're not allowed to change things up any way you want, but I think more variation could take you somewhere interesting. Blurred, third, occurred, turd, word, stirred, nerd....