I want to start by asking about your purpose in writing this. That’s a question you should always ask yourself, by the way. What’s the point? Why a poem? Why this poem?

If your purpose is to give voice to your deeply felt appreciation for the service and sacrifice of our armed forces, allow me to congratulate you. Mission accomplished. These are sentiments that would be shared by many, if not most, myself included, and you have expressed them well.

But let’s say your intentions reach further, that it’s no accident you have chosen to call this a poem, that, in fact, it is poetry itself to which you aspire. If that is the case, you have much work to do, because you have placed yourself in the arena with Wordsworth, Whitman, Frost, Stevens, Bly, Ashbery and, yes, Shakespeare.

So let me ask you: do you like poetry? Do you read poetry? Do you favor any particular poets over others. Why? Have you endeavored to unlock the mysteries of poetic craft? I ask, not to brow-beat you or embarrass you, but to make the point that, of all the elements that determine a poem’s worth, the poet’s feelings and sentiments are down at the bottom of the list.

Add to that, subject. A poem’s subject, while not irrelevant, is not what will make it memorable. No poem has ever found its way into the canon because it espoused a particular point of view, or advocated a specific ideology. It is language itself that makes or breaks a poem.

If you look at the usual elements associated with poetry—rhyme, meter and scansion, assonance, consonance, alliteration, imagery, as well as the myriad poetic forms that exist—none are concerned with subject. All are about the structure of the language itself, apart from any message that might be conveyed.

I can only point out that your language is not the language of poetry. I’m not talking about tweaking this line or that, or swapping this word for that to fix things. I’m talking about a paradigm shift in how you think about poetry.

In truth, it’s one of the most useless and self-indulgent of art forms. Prose gives us journalism, essays, stories, explanations, educational lessons, recipes, schedules... prose always has a purpose beyond the surface of the words. Poetry has no such purpose. As Archibald MacLeach said, “A poem should not mean, but be.”

I suggest you read as much poetry as you can get your hands on. Google “Literary Magazines,” and the myriad hits will provide you with an inexhaustible diet of the kinds of poetry that editors, for often obscure reasons, find worthy of publishing. Pick up a good anthology; it doesn’t matter which one. At this point you are trying to absorb the genre as a whole.

Read the masters of the 20th century. “The Class of 2000,” is an excellent collection of poets who were rising up to their peak maturity as the millennium changed. “Post-modern American Poetry,” is a fine collection of poets who explored the labyrinths of linguist structure, often abandoning subject altogether.

You might not get that far. You may find that you really don’t like poetry after all. On the other hand, you may find yourself seized with a passion for the mysteries of a form that can’t always be defined, but which you recognize when you encounter it. At that point, you will start writing poetry because you don’t know how to stop.