Lou

This is a poem, a reflection, that I wrote in fifth grade and have done a lot to since then. Enjoy!


To Lou, my little redhead friend
from far across the sea:

I remember, do you?
when we played soccer
and collected goose feathers
in your back yard.

Do you recall
when you came to my school
back in first grade.
I remember you then, quiet Lou,
who hailed from that mystic place,
that grownups call France.
And you were shy,
because you barely spoke any English.

I remember how we crafted huts
of sticks, leaves and rocks,
in the dirt by the old cicada tree.
How, when the sandbox froze over in the winter,
we helped the boys chip away at the ice.

That we ate ice cream together
on the field trip downtown.
How, when cicada season came,
cicadas poured out of their nests,
and how the teacher
got a cicada in her hair.

And I remember
you trying to teach me
your language.
feuille
feu
but I could never remember,
and it never seemed to matter.

I really like this poem. It reminded me of friends I had left back in Elementary School. You really hit some emotional strings there, which I appreciate.

As far as the poem itself, I would try breaking up the fourth stanza into two stanzas, although I'm not exactly sure what I'd add to either one.

My favorite line were these three...

I remember you then, quiet Lou,
Who hailed from that mystic place,
That grownups call France.

The use of the epithet "quiet Lou" is something which I really like. The part about France really communicated that sense of wonder that kids have about foreign lands and how much further away they seem when we're young.

Well done.

Hey sare!

My favorite stanza was the fourth. It was lots of wonderful sensory images that I just adored and, from all the descriptions, you could imagine the relationship between the two kids, which, again, I really loved. My main suggestion is that you trim the other stanzas up so that you can introduce your French friend in a way that incites the senses rather than just telling us that he is from France. Maybe he had some peculiar French traits you can write about! In any case, I think that would help the poem out even further.

Hey Sare

I like this poem It was very sweet, and it gave a really good insight to the relationship between you and Lou. The only thing is that the beginning seems like a story broke up into different lines instead of a poem.

The structure is good too. There's a soft build up, with a lot of excitement around the fourth stanza and a soft ending that rounds the whole thing off nicely.

Overall, nice work I look forward to reading more from you.
-Ten

I enjoy poems with a healthy dash of nostalgia and something to remember. I seem to write out of my own experiences and knowledge a lot, so I can really connect with it when others do that too, instead of pulling words and images at random out of nowhere, however pretty they might be.

But the images in here were pretty as well as meaningful in some way. I liked the idea of you collecting goose feathers in the backyard, of crafting huts of sticks, leaves and rocks, of chipping ice away at a sandbox, and eating icecreams in summer thinking about cicadas. It's things like these I most often remember about people - more what we did than what we talked about, or what they were like - and it's good to see that coming out.

As a poem poem, this doesn't function perfectly from a structural point of view, since there is really a collection of snapshot images of the friend and you with no overall theme tying it up, but from the memoire-poem point of view, I think it's fine, especially because it has that main element of nostaglia, that feeling of 'back in the old days.'

There were lines that struck me as uncharacteristically dull or grey, or ones that weren't phrased all that well. That detracted from the poem, so I'll list them below:

Now that I am in fifth grade,
About to graduate from Elementary School,
It seems so many years ago
That we played soccer

This did nothing for me. I don't really need to know exactly where you are at the point in time you wrote this - mentioning it is a memory is enough. It could be two years ago, or a lifetime ago - it doesn't matter, since the feeling of nostalgia will always be there. I didn't like the 'seems so many years ago,' either, since it sounds cliche and so makes the poem sound more fake - when it is clearly not fake at all. And the bit about playing soccer...not described well enough, I thought. No added descriptions just meant that I could see it as a fact, not a feeling - tell us a bit more about whether yuo played soccer during a thunderstorm, or by the lake, or what happened when you did.

It seems like so many years ago
That you came to my school
Back in first grade.
I remember you then, quiet Lou,
Who hailed from that mystic place,
That grownups call France.
And you were shy,
Because you barely spoke any English.

This didn't do anything for me, since it was a grey set of lines with little or no innovative imagery. I wouldn't have this stanza in at all - all it does, is serve to tell us that the friend is from France; and I'm sure that only needed a few words in itself. Like Snoink, I would have loved to have heard what particular French-y things Lou did - you ACTIONS were much more enticing than the DESCRIPTIONS here, so I'd say to go with where you are strongest. And when you said things like, 'you were shy...barely spoke English...quiet' - this was all telling and not showing. If one picture is worth a thousand words, then one action is worth...a million, I guess.

The relentless chirping,
Filling our earsDay and night.

So many good times,
So many distant memories,
All I have left
Of Lou.

Didn't like the cicadas part, since it was dragging on at that point, and the 'relentless chirping' is understood from the lines 'cicadas poured out of their nests.....' The ending was so-so - you could have instead left us with one last, truly monumental image/action to simmer in, instead of the rather closing speech-ish and cliche 'good times, good memories.'

Thanks for the read. PM me if you have any further questions about this.

I loved it! It had a lot of places where it brought back memories of me changing schools. I thought it was really good, keep writing.











-Bromthebard