Never Has Arrived

Never Has Arrived

Coming with footfalls soft
A shadow holds aloft
A scythe, wicked and wild
Here for his promised child.
Child who would never die,
Never has come passing by
And He will take you with Him
Your orders will be His whim.
All of your doom is because
Mother bound you by the laws:
“Never shall my boy leave me,
To all in my life grieve be.”
Never is here on wings black
Arrived for hopes to ransack
Here to laugh while dreams are slain.
Promises made in his name
From where He draws his vile power
To darken this Earth’s hour.

I really love the dark and evil mood to this poem. The death, the destruction, a child dying, a mother crying... hehe. However, I feel like your rhyme scheme strangles you in some places.

And He will take you with Him
Your orders will be His whim.

“Never shall my boy leave me,
To all in my life grieve be.”

In both these line pairs, the second line suffers because you're forcing the rhyme. In the first line pair, the second line just seems out of place and weird. Yeah, death is going to take the kid - but he will be working for death, too? It seems random. In the second pair, the second line has lost most word order, making it more than difficult to understand. Does she mean everything in her life will be grief? does she mean that everyone in her live will be grieving? Even if I try to put it in the right order I'm not sure it makes sense: Never shall my boy leave me, my life grieve be to all. grieve be to all in my life? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Perhaps the ultimate probably is "grieve be" or "be grieve" - that makes no sense. Changing word order is delicate - English isn't as free as some other languages.

Also in this line here: "Child who would never die" I feel like you need "The child" instead of just child.

Perhaps if you dropped the rhyming you'd be able to use the full force of meaning and darkness behind this poem, instead of making the rhyming break your arm to its will.

Best of luck!

In addition to what Suzanne said about the rhyming, I think this poem would benefit if you broke it up into stanzas. Right now, there's no separation between the lines, so when you switch focus, there's no cue to the reader that you're doing so. Stanzas are like paragraphs; every time you present a new idea or focus on a different one, it's a good idea to start a new stanza.

Another thing I noticed that you could use to make your poem easier to understand is punctuation. For example, the line "Never is here on wings black", it would be clearer that you're referring to the mother's saying "never" if you have "never" in quotations, like so.

One last thing I noticed is that the line lengths shifted near the end of the poem, most noticeably at the lines "Never is here on wings black / Arrived for hopes to ransack". There are two ways to "fix" this: start a new stanza from the line "Never..." or even out the syllable count. Right now, these two lines are short a syllable compared to the rest of the poem. Of the two, I think adding another syllable would be best since it will give you a syllable more to work with, which will help you make the second line more coherent and the rhyme less forced.

The poem's mood seems to revert back and forth. At first, I believed Death, or the Grim Reaper, was the unseen entity in this poem, then God Himself. I am still left confused, and am probably going to read this a couple more times before I understand, haha! At any rate, the dark mood of this poem, obviously, has kept me captivated, and I'm going to try my best to decipher it! Thanks for sharing!

~Panda;;