The Memory

Antiquated memory-lights glow
Through faded paper leaves
As retrospect clouds thought and breath,
And Time syncopates the heart’s beat.

A summer-spiced sun
Falls in white drops of rain
Through burnished treetops,
Leaving countless Os in the diamond-water.

Oh! and the stars of crow-black nights
Are the diadems of spectral kings
Bowing with ghostly chivalry
To the swanfeathered sky of morning.

I clutch to Nature’s glory,
Her radiance engraving the palms of my hands,
Imprinting my fingertips with the story of my creation –
Lining my memory with the golden filigree of kinder days.

I am not the best a poetry, and often never read it though I must say, this is very good! I found myself captivated on the first sentence, something very hard for poetry to do. Also just to warn you, I am a new person so my reviewing skills may not be the best.

Oh, by the way I'm Puffycherry, but you can call me Chrissie, and I am your reviewer.

Your word use was very high, this sentence especially I loved;

Lining my memory with the golden filigree of kinder days.

I thought the word use was great, and really placed an image in my head. This was done all through you poem, don't worry. And to that, I must say this is one heck of a great poem. I cannot make this big and large review, cause I am really bad at poetry so I'll leave it with a; this is an awesome poem!

Hi there Rose! I'm Hope, and I'll be reviewing today!

This is absolutely beautiful poem, your word use is lovely, and I simply loved it. It was a tad confusing at times trying to figure out what some lines meant, but I didn't have that much trouble. One thing I wanted to point out that took me a while to get was this.

A summer-spiced sun
Falls in white drops of rain
Through burnished treetops,
Leaving countless Os in the diamond-water.

I wasn't quite sure what you meant there and kept trying to pronounce it as Oz or something. Until I realized what you were saying. I would just cut that out though and say something like ripples, rings, or something to that effect especially because you use the word Oh to start out the next stanza.

Lovely job, keep writing!

~Hope

Goodness! This is really really really really good! I love it! LOVE IT!!!! It is so abstract, but the words flow together. I love the feeling. It made me feel warm reading it. Are you familiar with the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds? If you aren't, go check it out on youtube. If you are, your poem to me was slightly Beatles-esque! Keep up the superb writing! I honestly don't have any negative comments, except that I wasn't sure about the Oh!

I love it!

Sarebear

hmmmmmmm. Seems like some sort of exercise in word-pairing. Here are a few:

memory-lights: I didn't like this (especially because the word before it is 'antiquated'
retrospect-clouds: This was better
summer-spiced: This one is one of the best, it has color and flavor
diamond-water: boring
crow-black: "crow" barely modifies the word "black" you might as well just say "blackity black" and since the word pair is describing night, you could just kick it up anotehr notch and say "blackity black blackness"
swan-feathered: This one is a keeper, its got color and texture.

I agree with bond-girl in that i didn't like the "O's" to describe the raindrops... but you MUST use another word... I love the image you've created, the geometry of contact... its great.

It also took me a few minutes but i love the syncopation of time and heartbeats. I was thinking about it a lot actually... and I feel as though those are two things people associate pretty heavily, but here you seem to say NO, they are separate things. Time can exist without heart beats, etc.

Interesting ideas, just needs to be cleaned up is all.

best,

Anything with a title like 'The Memory' will catch my eye, since I'm a sucker for all things deeply nostalgic. I wondered how creative you might get with this - given the rather uncreative (but accurate) title - and I was not disappointed. Well, not too disappointed, that is to say.

Overall...what do you describe? You describe nature, and things that are usually seen as natural. However, you realise that to describe an old thing, in poetry, you must do it in a new way - hence the intriguing and different vocabulary you have used throughout the piece - some of which perdido pointed out above.

This is something I used to do quite a bit - as a good mental exercise, to see all the bizarre words I could put into a piece to refresh an old idea. In retrospect, it seems a bit like trying to paint over a corpse and spruce it up to make it look real - in other words, if the idea is too common (clouds, sun, rain, trees, water, sky, morning, night) then it takes a LOT of skill to give it any kind of life at all, since we've already seen it in countless different ways and forms. I didn't think that the new words thrown in (antiquated, retrospect, syncopate, brunished, diadem, chivalry, engraving, filigree, kinder) fitted in that well with the existing ideas - I mean, it seemed forced - the descriptions seemed half-there. Plus, it sounded like a teacher had given you a spelling word list in class and asked you to incorporate the words of the week into a poem - just look at the vocab that you have used! Would you expect to see it in a poem? And even if you do see it, you'd hope that it was neatly enough integrated for you to not notice it too much, like I did. The complex language that only gave half-impressions made the overall effect weaker, and I actually didn't feel any sense of nostalgia or longing for nature from reading this (I'm usually quite a nature-loving person).

So...again, a good exercise, but I'd suggest having a good think about the poetic aspects as well, and seeing where you might have improved. Read some natural poetry that is not classical, and you might find the same things described in really fascinating ways that WORK, and even new things that you had never really thought about before.