The Decline Of Life

The Decline Of Life


The midwife staring with eyes of a hawk.
Cold wisps and sounds of joy.
Enter my lungs and ear drums.
The vibrations on the car ride home
bring tears to these sensitive eyes.

Bolting through the garden
after the glistening winged object.
What is this creature?
Does it not like me?
The rock which hides in the grass.
The fall.

Please count to ten
Says the fat surgeon
they say I'm broken
but the creature got away.
Darkness consumes my soul.
A cold wisp beckons me

Why am I condemned to this hell
depression sinking in
the other children don't have these machines
it wont even let me move!

My parents are crying.
They have just found the news.
In five months
I'm moving away

Staring up at the wall
shakey and unwell
there's a tunnel in front of me
glowering like the bully's gaze.

The final tear from my mother falls
a cold wisp enters my nose
only twelve years old

Hello and welcome, Jonathan94!
Just so you know, technically the rules are that you should review 2 things before submitting your own work, but since you're new it's ok that you didn't know. There's lots of time to make up for it.

On to the poem:
This is an impressive poem. Maybe this is unnecessary of me to say, but the twelve-year-old son of one of my mom's friends just passed away after a time in the hospital, so your poem touched me on a deep personal level.

I've done a line-by-line critique below.

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The midwife staring with eyes of a hawk. (If it was me, I wouldn't start out with this line. It doesn't really foreshadow what is to come, and the phrase "eyes of a hawk" doesn't sound like something a newborn baby would come up with.)

Cold wisps and sounds of joy.(Cut the period at the end of this line.)

Enter my lungs and ear drums.

The vibrations on the car ride home

bring tears to these sensitive eyes. (Again, maybe this is not how a newborn baby would put it, but then again it's hard to know how a baby sees anything. I like the observation these lines make.)



Bolting through the garden

after the glistening winged object. (This is good but maybe the reader needs some hint that the child is much older now. The jump in time was a bit disorienting.)

What is this creature?

Does it not like me? (I like these lines.)

The rock which hides in the grass.

The fall. (These are fragments, but in poetry sometimes that's ok. In this case, they are awkward, but powerful.)



Please count to ten

Says the fat surgeon (I love the details you include; they are what make the poem interesting.)

they say I'm broken

but the creature got away.

Darkness consumes my soul.

A cold wisp beckons me (I like the way this echoes back to the first part.)



Why am I condemned to this hell

depression sinking in

the other children don't have these machines

it wont even let me move! (You convey a child's sense of bewilderment well.)



My parents are crying.

They have just found the news.

In five months

I'm moving away



Staring up at the wall

shakey and unwell (shaky and unwell)

there's a tunnel in front of me

glowering like the bully's gaze. (I don't really like this line. It doesn't seem to have much to do with the rest of the poem; we've never gotten a hint of the child being bullied before.)



The final tear from my mother falls

a cold wisp enters my nose (Another haunting echo. Very good.)

only twelve years old (The line that brought tears to my eyes. Looking back on the poem, though, there's a slight discrepancy; while reading the part about the child chasing the butterfly, I got the impression he/she was much younger than twelve. Don't change the butterfly part too much, though. It conveyed the child's innocence beautifully.)

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Overall, really good. It's so very sad, and it's good in how it goes from the child's birth to his death. Thank you for sharing this.

Thanks for the critique im very sorry to hear about your mothers friends son