A Day Spent Traveling

[Lykren]

From the road
everywhere looks like nowhere.

From the road
the sky continues to stretch out
in a vast silent arc
toward the sea.

From the road
the grass lies prone
upon the world, glittering.

And the big, brown hills
are waves facing
the coming darkness.

[virtuoso]

You have made an interesting sketch of your surroundings. You need a comma between vast and silent, also, maybe a comma after waves. Enjoyed your poem!

[blank|verse]

Nice work, Lykren, you’ve captured the mood of the journey very well in a few sparse images.

The last line reminds me of the last line of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’: ‘Downward to darkness, on extended wings.’

If you’ll forgive the tinkering, I wonder if calling the poem ‘From the Road’ (despite its proximity to Kerouac) and cutting the refrain would work… I also cut ‘glittering’ as it seemed a bit out of place in context; the ‘lying prone’ suggests exhaustion or death even; ‘glittering’ suggests Elton John. :) I think you should also be careful with modification - 'vast silent', 'big, brown' - particularly in such a short poem. I've left the former, but I didn’t like ‘big’, it struck a slightly child-like note, so I couldn’t resist re-working the last stanza. Anyway, just a few suggestions, see what you think...


From the Road

Everywhere looks like nowhere.

Grass lies prone
upon the world.

The sky stretches
its vast silent arc
to touch the sea.

And brown waves of hills
pulse and swell towards
the coming darkness.