An excellent diversion from your typical Dear World Christmas letter. I have tried to concoct fake ones to send out and even if this is only slightly exaggerated, you've succeeded in putting a lot of spice in an otherwise boring type of letter.
You write well, it flows naturally and we are caught up in the "almost" possibility of all the events. Bravo
Keep up the creative work,
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I would give these poems separate items. I really liked the first one, which reminds me of gay love, "forbidden by the eyes of the ignorant."
In "Skyscraper" your initial line is wrong grammatically:
"How can you touch the sky before I?" You need to write either "before I DO" or before ME. I understand why you want the line as it is, for the rhyme, but one cannot go against the grain of proper grammar.
The third poem didn't do anything for me. And I most certainly do not agree with the line:
"Frightened people will realize you’ve been torn apart"
Frightened people do not look closely enough at another human being to see the wounds in their souls.
In this last poem I need to remain faithful to my own standards and say that I don't think the repetition of the words frightened and fake add anything to the poem. Try and enrich your poem by finding synonyms. Here on WDC we have a wonderful tool called the Ideanary which is found in the Sight Tools pull down window on the left side of your screen.
So, my rate here is an average of the rates I would have given the individual poems.
Keep up the creative work,
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The ending of this poem is magnificent:
"The white roses are melting
Over the grave, falling to the floor
No one sees...
The sky cries suddenly
In rain...
People run away to their homes
Leaving her alone again"
It shows me your potential. But the rest of this poem has grammar errors, spelling errors and is not nearly as powerful as the image in your last lines.
Poetry is like any other literary form; one must go back and revise, cut lines which are weak - or find ways to strengthen them, look for repeating words which can be eliminated; and this takes time. I have the feeling that this is a rough draft and that if you find time to do what you can to perfect it, this poem will become much better.
Keep writing,
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There R sum excellent ideas in UR poem. Sum very powerful phrases in UR poem.
This is the language we all have learned to use when writing our quick text messages on our cell phones. It does not have its place here. It has its place in your first draft when you're in a hurry. Learn to use your REPLACE tool in your word processing program if you must write your drafts like this. But I would suggest that you learn to write the words out properly.
The blackness of this poem is almost overpowering. You see death as a solution to a life which has become unbearable. That is an opinion; as one having lost my best friend to suicide, I know this is not true. But I am not here to find fault with the premise of your poem, only its presentation.
You begin with a grammatical error:
do u worth living?
ARE YOU worth living? is the correct way to ask this question in the English language.
There are typos in this piece : "I think YOU don't worth athing". And this phrase makes no sense as it is currently written.
There is an incredible power behind the lines :
"and though this place is pure and true
it's full of scars
gardens of knives and blades
it's full of lakes
lakes of warm pain and blood"
But unfortunately there is no one to tell us if death by suicide is really as alleviating those desperate people make it out to be.
I would counsel you to revise this text, take out the improper spellings, and not to abbreviate U for you, UR for YOUR or YOU'RE and R for are. There is a time and a place for everything; here is one place that you will be judged on the seriousness not only of what you have to say but how you say it.
Your play on words is very well thought out, and what you say about your subject is a sad reality for many of us.
Only the line "warm reunions parent/child" is not right. Properly place the parent/child compound adjective before the noun and the line will flow. It unfortunately adds a rhyme which you certainly wanted to avoid, but in my opinion, this is the lesser of the two evils - unless the form you've chosen specifically forbids rhyme. Then you're up a creek without a paddle, because in any event I would find a way to alter this line.
Thanks for sharing this little gem,
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I like this poem quite a lot, its sensitivity, its honesty and the quiet cry of despair hidden in its words.
Two comments however on usage:
"The wind she cradles me gently, slowing my descent,
and from her arms, I was then passed on to the water."
In English, it is not common to set up a subject (the wind) then add a corresponding pronoun (she) before using the verb (cradles.) She is one word too many. In the second line, "I was then passed on to the water" is awkward. You were not a football, and the verb passed evokes that immediately. We pass an object from one person to another. And if you keep this verb, INTO the water is better English. I would write something more traditionally "poetic" here : "and from her arms, I was then gently lowered into the water."
And at the very end of your poem, I don't like the mix of tense between the last four lines. If you keep the last line in the past tense, change "circles" in the present to "circled" in the past. The flow will be better.
And excellent poem and one I am glad to have discovered.
Keep up the creative work,
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In this short piece, which needs to be viewed more often, Scarlett addresses fear at all ages and has a very true sense of perspective. There is nothing gory here, no horror, simply a list of common fears all of us have had, will have and will undoubtedly transmit to our beloved children.
And they all stem from her initial premise, which comes from a surprising place.
Excellent work, Scarlett.
Keep obseving. You do a great job of it.
It is rare that I find a poem that whose text touches me enough that I don't look at the form to see what could be inproved.
Scarlett's text is exquisitely simple. She expresses her emotions clearly with well chosen words which evoke exactly what she has in mind. There may be no room for the imaginary in this poem, but we feel her journey from the beginning to the end of the poem as if we ourselved were the narrator.
Bravo, Scarlett. A poem to be enjoyed by young and old, but especially those still young enough at heart to understand the message of the final stanza.
You have written a moving tribute to the country of India. It is colorful, a verbal photo album from a voyage dear to your heart.
If I had a criticism to formulate it would be to unify a tad bit more your line length. Two very short lines stick out like sore thumbs :"and warms you up" which could conceivably be eliminated from the poem; and "Her spirit is free." This last line says something important, relevant to the entire poem, and maybe you should leave it be. But it is a small matter of maintaining as harmonious a visual "ensemble" as you can.
Keep up the good work,
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You announce in your introduction that this poem is written for women having battled cancer.
Your immediate metaphor is to compare them with a raven. Female heels become talons which ravens use as weapons.
I am sorry, but I don't follow this much further.
Your first two stanzas are brimming with incongruous phrases. "Rain looming in leaky hollowness." A roof leaks, rain does not. "A raven lay [in the] void." Or void OF SOMETHING. You certainly mean lifeless, but the use of void is awkward. And this was the first time I asked myself, "what's a raven got to do with woman battling and eventually dying of cancer?"
"Wings thirsting tenderly" doesn't mean much, unless you immediately speak of freedom. But this line comes immediately after the void raven, and if she'd dead, the wings can no longer either beat or thirst for freedoms. And is it the WINGS which would thirst for freedom? It's maybe a lovely combination of words, but they have to be more skillfully crafted for the average reader to understand their implications together.
Idem for
"depleted by silk lace façades
left to cover incomplete sleep
with pleas urging her to break
in pain."
The words are lovely, but what do they mean? In my book, death is not incomplete sleep, it is permanent sleep. But maybe I'm lacking in poetic liberty. This is certainly an elaborate description of the casket, but then what does "urging her to break in pain" have to do with anything? Break FROM pain, OK, I would understand that. Maybe it's a problem of word choice...
Throughout your poem you have many interesting groups of words, which seem to me to have been combined simply for the sake of combining words. Frequently your ill-chosen adjectives, adverbs and verbs have made me wonder "what is he really talking about?" That's OK two or three times in a poem, but I have pondered almost EVERY line here. It's dangerous to write in suce a way as to force the reader to reread two or three times the entire ppoem to catch its subtlety, but the experienced reader that I am still understands nothing of the details in this poem after more that three readings.
Keep writing, but remember, all of your readers are not as intelligent as you are, and none of us know what was going on in your mind when you decided to combine words like "consuming her in ink like blankness.."
This is indeed a sweet tribute to the birth of a child, but it could easily have been called "Sarah Jane". You have nothing specific to say about the child identified as William Archer. Not that he has a head full of fluffy blond hair, or a wrinkled nose, or even the perfect count of ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes. You simply assure the reader that he will be loved.
In your opening lines, you make a comparison: that he came into this world fighting. Why fighting? Did he almost die? You mention "fighting like some of his ancestors." There needs to be some sort of precision for this comparison. Are the two mentioned in the poem families of mixed races and this is why the children are considered to come into this world fighting? Are they of mixed religions and will have to fight off opinionated people all their lives? This is extremely unclear.
There are, in my mind, many details which need to be worked out or explained to the reader so that this poem becomes a personalized portrait of William Archer and not just another very welcomed new born.
But that's just one man's opinion.
Keep writing,
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The premise of this poem is interesting, that ghosts are with us daily and that they communicate and our problem is to understand their signals.
Your list in the middle of the poem is much too long; it is clear that these elements are important to you as a human being, or even as a writer, but they all have little tie-in with the body of the poem itself. As easily as you could have added chocolate and Bach, poodles and crisp bank notes, you should limit it to the elements which have some tie to the poem.
And although your lines are short, this is a long poem. It would be easier for the reader were you to divide it into stanzas.
Keep writing.
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Wren has painted another perfect picture, this time about life dwindling from the population of an old folks home.
Her portraits are true, her poetic color is polychrome, and her sincerity is not overwhelming. She shows, she paints a grim truth, but without going overboard.
This poem is a masterpiece I would recommend to everyone sensitive enough to understand and appreciate the plight of our elder citizens.
Bravo, Wren
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"Slowly the goodness is seaping from me....
...
Drip, drip, drip."
The driping implies the tears of the loneliness you mention further in the poem, but the relationship between this loneliness and the GOODNESS dripping from you is poorly established. There is something lacking here, in my opinion.
"Wondering
If you
Were nothing but a dream
And only I could see you
Only I could speak to you"
this thought it incomplete. Wondering if you were real, I realized I was just speaking to myself; the connection is poorly established.
Poetry is NOT a collection of simple random thoughts placed with black words on white paper; there are a few connections missing in this poem which should be easy to edit into your poem. It can be done with a bit of punctuation or the addition of a word here or there to link your ideas.
A good way to write poetry is first to write all of your ideas in complete sentences and then eliminate the words, keeping only the phrases that merely suggest the meaning which is flowing in your head. Good poetry does not leave the story line for the reader to complete - good images will take the reader into his own mind to add to the elements you have crafted into your poem.
A tearful pride, the Irish have. You share it well. There is a longing spreading out from this poem which warms my heart, even tho' I not be an Irish lad.
One line, yet again, bothers me:
"Though you may ne'er stepped on Irish shores?"
Shouldn't you write ne'er HAVE stepped?
I especially like the closing stanza with the refrain idea taken from the preceding one. Very lyrical. Have you any musical talents?
The hardest thing about our introduction boxes is the limit on the characters. I found this poem on the left-hand side "newbie" section of our pages and didn't know who was the author.
Your line "Ê"Hatred" is aimed toward religious conservatives who hate gays causing deaths"
makes it sound like it's the gay people causing death, and I almost expected an anti-AIDS piece. You might want to rephrase this just a tad...
As for the poem itself, I'm not sure what to think about it. It seems a little obvious and I don't find anything terribly original in your text. I'm sorry I was not more receptive to it.
I would play the devil's advocate with your first line - "from an evil heart," is only one point of view. My "good" Christian family is pursuaded of their pure hearts when treating me as the devil's spawn. The way your poem is phrased, you do not define this phrase but go on to include it in your definition of hatred. I think, after writing this, that what I don't like about your poem is that it is not explicite enough - you don't permit yourself to go into any detail.
I definitely would place a colon at the end of the following line "Rushing with destruction; crushing life." as your first stanza is defining "hatred."
I rate this at a FOUR star because the world needs more poetry like this, the world needs to realize that injustice must end. Unfortunately, I am pessimistic.
Keep up the good work
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There is a lot of raw emotion here which gives your poem a lot of force. I wonder though if you have edited it? So many poets seem to think that poetry must never be touched, and indeed it takes a lot of experience to maintain the original emotivity which created the piece while editing it. That's why it's important to have friends who read your items. In lieu of friends, here at WDC we have fellow writers who have all been in the same predicament : wondering if we have done the best job possible of writing the dictates of our hearts.
My favorite lines of the poem are the following: Your ignorance of my plight,
Causes phoenix tears to burn strong,
Illuminating my saddened face,
What I want to do now is not showmanship, it is simply a way to show you that with a few minor changes your ideas can become stronger and speak louder.
Your first line is too long when you look at it compared to the body of the poem. You imply death in this poem, buried deep in the ground. I would use that immediately in the first line which might be better: Looking through the watery surface reflecting back at me,
"Looking down, the watery surface reflects back at me."
There were two present participles in the first line, and here you add three more. Drowning as you smile.
Sinking deeper into this dark grave,
Burying me along with your pain.
I would change the last line and write simply:
"Bury me along with your pain." You close this first portion of the poem with an act instead of continuing to describe. In my opinion it is much stronger this way.
Now we come to your first question. Which might be two, depending on how you phrase things. What did I ever do?
With the exception of loving you.
If you intend two questions, I would place a question mark at the end of this second line. But, because there is another question following these lines, I would combine them in the following way so as not to bog down the reader:
"What did I ever do
except to love you?"
The next question, in my mind is only one and the question mark would be better placed at the end of the second line: Did I deserve this misery?
Time after time thrown at me.
Choking down resignation. Here you have a period, I would use a comma for your idea continues another two lines.
Evaporating these deep depths,
Where I fell so long ago.
Evaporating seems to be the wrong verb. And deep depths is redundant. Use another adjective like "unending" or "bottomless."
Only, with my end will it cease and become right
This is the last line of your poem. "And become right" is a tad too trite in my opinion. It is often very difficult to end a poem and I agree that you need something to brighten the gloom of your poem at the end of it, but "right" doesn't seem to be what's called for.
You have the makings of a good poem here but in my mind you need to take a bit more time to edit. The ideas I have shared with you do not fundamentally change anything in your poem - they are what I would do to "tighten" the flow of your words so as to maximize their impact on the reader.
Of course another poet taking the same amount of time to review this poem would have other ideas. They only reflect my personal state of mind after reading your poem.
like a born-again host?s wife
on a Christian network.
It's OK to take political or religious positions, and lord knows there are not enough of us doing so.
But this part of the stanza has no place in your wonderfully sensitive poem about a young child's last kiss for his dead mother. Which explains my low rating.
Keep writing, but not every subject can withstand a glance of outside humour. This one would have been so much better if you'd resisted the temptation.
I too, am "into writing." I differ from you in that I truly want to share what I have written so I correct my mistakes as try to do the best job I can when presenting my texts.
Your introduction: (One of my songs many like, hard to inderstnd sorry.)
says much about you. That you are happy that your text is hard to understand and that you don't care about that fact. That's fine. I for one, understood everything in your poem, and liked it, like the "many" you speak of in your introduction.
Taking the risk of repeating myself, in public once again, your texts are riddled with errors and that is a pity.
Keep writing. And above all, edit please. What you have to say is worth spreading around.
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You have a lovely poem which in my opinion is spoiled by systematic errors in your text.
Here at WDC we are not obliged to write on-line, and even if we choose to do so, there is a spell checker available for us everytime we hit our EDIT button (it is on the same toolbar.)
If you want readers to take you seriously as a writer, you must polish your text. it matters not if you are 15, 75 with no education or a doctorate's degree. If your text is sloppy, many readers will turn away. And in this case it would be too bad, because your ideas are interesting.
Keep writing and above all, never fear to edit.
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You have several typos in your text, one of which, the "fleecing" in the last line, may alter the meaning this crucial spot. Never hesitate to reread two or three times to catch those errors that a spellchecker won't catch. Fleecing as well as fleeting both exist and the only person to catch this type of error is the author.
This last line is filled with an impied double negative which makes it extremely difficult to understand your meaning. "Like a fleecing moment everlasting never."
I presume you meant "fleeting" which is a word which implies something temporary. Everlasting is a synonym for forever, implying it will continue to be stable until the end. Never at the end of the line cancels everything. What do you mean by this last line? I normally like lines such as this one, which are designed to make the reader stop and ponder for a moment, but I'm still pondering with not many solutions on the wandering horizon...
I will not speak to you of repetitions in poetry. I fear it would do no good. "Everlasting" is your title word and it is a lovely word to be used as an idŽe fixe. You use it three times as well as its synonym forever which is used thrice as well. But I don't have the impression when reading your text that you reserve this word for the most special moments in the poem to highlight a particular idea or set of words.
You have an interesting concept for a poem, but I'm not sure that you have taken the time to express your ideas as clearly as they might one day be expressed, for I got a bit lost.
A writer's most difficult job is getting the ideas which always seem crystal clear in our individual heads to appear limpid on the page, accessible to any reader. One should not have to force the reader to read between the lines, even when writing abstract concepts in poetry, such as you express here.
Keep writing, follow your heart, but remember that you readers don't know what's in your head and if you want them to follow your paths, you must really show them the way.
YOu have a few interesting ideas sketched in this small poem. It could easily be expanded, which I would try to do, if not for the poetic exercise.
However the basis premise of your questions "willl I ever become this" or "will I (just) become that?" is inherently one of comparison. You indicate a viable comparison in stanzas two, three and five. One and four don't really follow the pattern. And in order to make the comparisons more accute, I would add the word JUST that I placed in parentheses.
In the last stanza you need to use dream in the plural.
Keep writing,
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Once you get into the dialogue where the line cuts show the reader the distance between your ideas, you very effectively develop your three characters. The descriptive passages need to be reworked to flow more smoothly.
As a general rule writers here on WDC have opted for a single spacing between paragraphs and dialogue lines for reader comfort. You may or may not indent first lines of paragraphs.
What you have written here has many of the essential elements for an introduction - you give the reader the desire to learn more about what's going to happen when he turns the page. Now, you have to furnish us with those pages.
Things I would change: against the mackerel sky, mottled with pink and gold.
In my opinion, "mackerel" is not really a color and since I've never seen one fresh out of the sea, I am not sure that your use is correct. If the following "mottled pink and gold" is a true description of the color of a mackerel, then you're defining the term and in any case I think both adjectives are unnecessary.
In the first paragraph, you muse between MEN's needs and MAN's need. I would uniformize this.
From the second sentence here you start a new idea - it would be better to cut the new idea into a new paragraph. These are the thought that run through one travelers head, if not so eloquently put into words but rather a vague feeling.
The man stared out the window for a few more minutes and then turned, pressing his head into the uncomfortable seat.
In general your paragraphs are too large with too much information in them.
In the part commencing with "the man stared out of the window..." you have several typos which need to be corrected.
Indeed in the rest of the paragraph, after my proposed cut, there are too many unrelated things which happen. I would cut it yet again two or three times. Too much being said in one chunk of words.
IN the following paragraph where you include dialogue, it is common practice to seperate the lines of dialogue with seperate paragraphs to help the readers follow the changes. She said, outstretching her hand. He stared at it for a few minutes, as if perplexed, and then grinned and shook it. "Tom."
Here your change of speaker is indicated in one single word. It would take just a "he responded." for the reader to understand what's going on instead of having to reread the second time. I thought she was talking to her boyfriend asking him to introduce himself the first time I read through this passage. (Of course this was cleared up in the next paragraph, but I had already reread...) A bit confusing where a bit more clarification on the writer's part would have put the reader at ease.
You seem to have the ideas, now you need to go back and edit, put your text through a spellcheck and grammar check just in case and spend hours making sure your text flows as smoothly for your reader as it does invisibly in your head. Writer's all know automatiacally what they want to say, putting it into phrases that any reader can follow eaily is the difficult part.
Keep writing,
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There are a few rough ideas expressed here, in my mind they could be better refined.
Your entire poem repeats itself too much, you have made no attempt to use synonyms to enrich your images. You speak of endless "dead men" and repeat identically several several phrases. The predictable nature of your words can also have the opposite of the hypnotic effect you may have desired : it can bore your reader.
In a gothic rock song, your text can repeat with only three or different words in each strophe. In poetry, I personally don't see the need to such repetition.
Dead men can be ghosts rattling their decrepit bones, they can be ghoulish vampires; there are all sorts of nasty images one can create to speak of the living dead who haunt our dreams, which could become "nightmares" very easily in your poem for another bit of variety.
But I don't intend to rewrite this poem for you.
As always, I remain a faithful reader for authors who, stimulated by my reviews, desire my opinion concerning their eventual revisions.
Keep working,
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Apparently well documented from the historical side, but my major complaint is that if this is true to historlcal fact, the means by which they treated prisoners in need of psychological help would be interesting. Thus your story ends much too soon. Has he become a bumbling idiot because of the solitary confinement and will he be healed once his life returns to something more normal? This I think is essential to the story.
Although this story is very long and I hope unfinished, I eagarly recommend it to anyone curious about the effects of solitary confinement on the psyche of a prisoner.
Congratulations for a well-written story.
alfred
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Your first line is too long when you look at it compared to the body of the poem. You imply death in this poem, buried deep in the ground. I would use that immediately in the first line which might be better: