"Skins of a Matryoshka Doll"

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--
Judgment is born with silence,
expression bears familiarity,
and knowledge sleeps around with faith,
providing speculation based on morality.
--

Blind people can see
the color of your skin:
after all, they can feel your pride;
they can see
the way you glance to God -
they can feel your certainty inside.

Blind, she can read your torn-up, ragged pages -
she can feel your cuts;
she can feel the light radiating off your eyes,
the way you talk to her makes her smile, exactly
how your cheeks curve whenever you smile.
A family once brought up together.
Gray hair soft, liver spots perfect,
wabi-sabi signature adorned by leather.

Forged time has passed, now a jubilating chat -
“We knew each other once, is it still the same?” then said in haste,
“I missed you, you’re beautiful: have you known that?”
She heard telephones, boys pushing, toys spying.
“I don’t,” she said, “I’m old,” -
and you knew she was not lying.

Time runs out, no first step made;
the glimmering of her fire is going blind -
death walks through the door:
little girl no more,
the other nevermore alive.

Her last words:
“Don't gain the world and lose your soul,
wisdom is better than silver or gold...”

“Send me a letter, grandma, will you, from the heavens?
I know you are okay up there, sold.
No more blind; with your husband.
I’ll meet you once again, when my hours will toll.”

Grief is what your swollen eyes accept;
self distempered at defect,
and taken into custody:
for solitude is not at all your friend.
Last edited by FlyingInEbony on Tue May 18, 2010 3:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
"You stand on the brink of greatness. The world will open to you like an oyster. No... not like an oyster. The world will open to you like a magnificent vagina." - "Bullets over Broadway", Woody Allen, Douglas McGrath




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One thing that caught my eye right off the bat was that the first letter of every line is capitalized. I think this poem would be much stronger if this wasn't the case. Presentation has a huge impact on poetry, and right now, the capitalized first letters mess with the flow of the lines and visually gives the poem a feeling of boring uniformity (if that makes sense).

Another thing that caught my attention was that some lines/stanzas don't make much sense. Sometimes, it's the punctuation; other times, it's due to word choice/syntax; but the fact remains that some lines/stanzas don't make sense, which really detracts from your poem. One such line is "I know you are okay up there, sold." I have no idea what you're trying to say with that line.

Yet another thing that I think could use some work is the connection between stanzas. Especially at the beginning, it's unclear how the stanzas connect to each other. I suggest hinting at the connections that you make later on in the poem, or rearranging the stanzas so that the second or third stanza becomes the first.

Finally, I caught at least one tense shift in fourth stanza. It was very distracting, and it threw off the flow. An easy fix would be to separate that last line into a stanza of its own. In the future, though, be a little more careful with tenses. Stanzas are like paragraphs, and just as you don't shift tenses in paragraphs, you don't shift tenses in stanzas.

Otherwise, this was an interesting poem. You had some good imagery, and though I couldn't understand it because of the confusing lines/stanzas, there was enough to the poem that I wanted to understand. So, overall, not a bad job.
Secretly a Kyllorac, sometimes a Murtle.
There are no chickens in Hyrule.
Princessence: A LMS Project
WRFF | KotGR




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Thanks for reviewing! What do you think now?
"You stand on the brink of greatness. The world will open to you like an oyster. No... not like an oyster. The world will open to you like a magnificent vagina." - "Bullets over Broadway", Woody Allen, Douglas McGrath



Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?
— Mary Oliver