Failing "Reflower"

2 posts
User avatar
Gender Female
Points 890
Reviews 688
Twenty four perfect flowers:
blooms open, white, like pearls
pressed into pristine petals,
and they whisper the smell of
sunshine into the lazy wisps
of afternoon breeze.

Beneath them, soil,
black and thick with balance.
It's almost visible to my
naked eye that every atom has
eight jewels on their crown,
and perhaps used libran minerals
as fertilizer.

One picked would not reap
beauty in a vase; it shrivels like
fed arsenic or acetone,
and the flora are lined by
white pickets, quiet knights of moral,
clad in paint that doesn't
peel or chip in its youth.

Stealing the flowers was as simple
as ripping apart your legs.
Carpe Diem.




User avatar
Gender Male
Points 11542
Reviews 426
The imagery in the first and third stanza is really well done. However, the second stanza seems broken and out of place. Talking about the atoms of the flower and libran minerals doesn't fit right.

The fourth stanza is interesting. I'm not sure where you are going with it; that is, whether it's a last act of vengeance, a symbolic gesture, or something else altogether. In any case, it takes the poem into a radically different area, and definitely makes it all very creepy and somewhat disturbing.

I like the third stanza a lot because of the imagery, similes, and metaphors employed in it. Very nice.



They who talk all day of beauty call all the plain things dirty
— John Darnielle