Analysis of Short Lived



The night was brief, its black tent
threatened to fly away from the sunset,
Stars gleamed naked, then hid in a half-light.
Between the glimmer, night ran as if hunted.

No one thought this a good sign.
No one blessed the fleeting dark,
no one praised the lingering and early light.

We saw the cornered eyes of backyard critters,
how they backed up into imaginary dens.
We saw the exhumed moon
laid out as it was like a corpse.

We saw it all, and no one mentioned
the neonatal, the premature arrival
of that stillness.


Scheme XXAX XXA XXXX XXX
Poetic Form
Metre 0111111 101101101 1110110011 01010111110 1111011 1110101 11101000101 1101011110 11110101001 110011 11111101 111101110 0010001010 1110
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 503
Words 95
Sentences 7
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 3, 4, 3
Lines Amount 14
Letters per line (avg) 29
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 102
Words per stanza (avg) 24
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Submitted by JohnDiamond on February 16, 2021

Modified on March 05, 2023

28 sec read
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