“To Catch a Cricket…”
To catch a cricket is harder than it looks,
with high summer grass swaying, speaking deceit.
The small child’s hands seeking to grasp, to clutch
a form of control denied him in his home.
With high summer grass swaying, speaking deceit,
the child builds and peoples a world of his own.
A form of control denied him in his home.
He desires not to be a silent partner.
The child builds and peoples a world of his own.
He lives always in fear but not for himself,
he does not want to be a silent partner.
Yet it is his burden to play the witness.
Powerless to change what is before his eyes.
The small child’s hands seeking to grasp, to clutch,
to hold a life with gentleness and respect.
To catch a cricket is harder than it looks.
5 comments:
Vince's poem is about a young kid catching a cricket. The poem seems to be also about this child's imagination and its carefulness with the cricket.
That's a straightforward explication, but I think there's more there ("I have a deeper analysis," as my friend's nemesis used to say). Through the poem the cricket becomes the child's spirit or soul, I think, reaching for life and learning how to grasp and not kill it. (These numinous things always sound better out loud than they do typed out.)
Yes, I was going to move onto more but then we read your post and thought we should move on and get more poems read.
Very sensible.
I've seen Vince's final version of this poem, and I'm going to comment on that, so it might be a bit mysterious for the rest of you. I think what you have added in the fourth stanza is really good and important, but that it will be even stronger if you manage to retain the pantoum's strict form, by re-using/re-working lines. The dark purple bruises/his own skin remaining untouched—I think if you go back to it and work again, stanzas three and four could be more intertwined and that the further work will be even more satisfying. "His burden to play the witness" and wishing he could end her pain are both very good.
It can be frustrating to be restricted by form, but of course there's good reason for that restriction. It makes us work even harder, and pushing our minds to find a way to fulfill the objective requirements of form can sometimes allow the entirely subjective requirements of memory/image/idea to blossom (not grotesquely, maybe!).
It's a lovely and then a disturbing image, the child catching that small life to cage it, in order to control something, some small thing, in his world.
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