Swallows punctuate
grey sky — black parentheses
bracketing the wind.
Jac Cattaneo writes poetry and short fiction and is currently working on a novel. She teaches Cultural Studies to Fine Art degree students.
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16 Responses to “PASSAGE • by Jac Cattaneo”
Comments
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June 19th, 2009 at 6:00 am
Yes, but why that particular enjambment? Is it to keep the word “parentheses” from being on the bottom line? Isn’t that extraneous to the poem?
June 19th, 2009 at 6:11 am
Very nice Haiku. I loved the image.
June 19th, 2009 at 6:19 am
Lovely poem Jac.
Roberta – I think the enjambment is designed to emphasise the notion of puntuation and disjunction that the swallows themselves present in the sky.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:16 am
Very nice.
…”black parentheses
bracketing the wind.”
I so like this image.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Lovely image for a cloudy day.
–dj
June 19th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Very visual poem.
I can just see those swallows.
June 19th, 2009 at 11:40 am
nice one, Jac. good image and word choice.
June 19th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Beautiful haiku. Loved it!
June 19th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Valerie – Re. punctuation as only reference: if that’s so, wouldn’t the last line then be “the wind bracketed, stressing a puncuation mark at end of each line”?
Why is it “bracketing” instead of “bracket” the same tense?
Do you think there is any significance to throat references “Swallow” and “wind”? I’m not sure it’s significant.
June 19th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
I think the visual imagery of sky punctuation is strong, memorable, and very apt, but there seems to me other references subtly implied because, though of course I may be wrong, there seems to me some word shifting which actually weakens the poem from a stronger vision and synchronization to make some other point.
June 19th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
A 5 is a 5 is a 5.
June 19th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Very nice.
June 19th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Ohhhhhhhh, yes!
Very nice!
A 5 from me.
(rushes off to jump on the band wagon and write about white geese semi-coloning the sky)
June 20th, 2009 at 4:03 am
It’s a terrific compression of a memorable image with multiple meanings into but a few words. It’s the essence of metaphor, cleanly, clearly, starkly, and therefore, powerfully expressed. Terrific work, Jac.
And Roberta, the swallows would be finished, if not dead, if the wind were “bracketed.” The swallows are actively flying, hence, they are “bracketing” the wind.
Let’s not burn a forest in order to correct leaves.
June 20th, 2009 at 5:01 am
Dennis – I just looked up “swallow” in Wikipedia and learned that they frequently glide, so perhaps you’re right and it is the swallows bracketing the wind. I thought of the black brackets as the heavy and threatening black clouds that precede and follow a heavy storm down here where I live. That image made the poem more alive to me, but then I’m not sure I ever saw swallows.
June 20th, 2009 at 6:40 am
I thought the image, straightforwardly delivered, was beautiful. It was: (event 1)Gray sky. Swallows dart through the gray clouds, speeding homeward — they saw a menace on the horizon. (event 2)The black clouds very soon follow, dramatically fronting the short, grey-skied lashing windstorm which again is trailed by the closing parenthesis of heavy black clouds dissipating back into grey. The metaphor of these visual images as puncuation for the threats written in the sky is, to me, original and very memorable.