Second Language

it felt like two summers
I could not hear
I could not hear anything
it was just words and I wanted sound

so I cried

I cried just to hear it
the blizzard in my heart
because I could not articulate
could not make it into words
could only make sound

untranslated and unapologetic
selfish and alone
ununderstood

I fell upon deaf ears
branded with laziness
English is only a second language

This was only ok to me. I didn't like the fact that there wasn't really any capitalization except for the "I". Also it had no punctuation, and the stanzas didn't seem to have any pattern. I mean if that's how you like and want it what ever, but I wasn't a fan of it... sorry. But I do like the concept in this piece.

I totally understand what you are saying. I am still not sure how I feel about capitalization or punctuation for this piece... so I left them out as I often do in drafts. Thank you for the feedback, I will keep this in mind.

Hi bombshellcat,

First of all, don't listen to people who whine about punctuation for the sake of punctuation. Granted, there are limits, but poetry should transcend such barriers.

Secondly, this is plain bad. Your imagery, for starters, is confusing and hollow:

bombshellcat wrote:it felt like two summers
I could not hear
I could not hear anything
it was just words and I wanted sound

so I cried

I cried just to hear it
the blizzard in my heart
because I could not articulate
could not make it into words
could only make sound

The only two images I could see here a

untranslated and unapologetic
selfish and alone
ununderstood

I fell upon deaf ears
branded with laziness
English is only a second language

Three images. That's it?

"summers"
"blizzard"
"branded with laziness"

That last one makes little sense (how does one even get branded with something like laziness? Can you even imagine that at all?) and the first two are shot at the reader like machine guns, without any supporting descriptions.

Show us, don't tell us.

Hope that helped,
Galerius

You are certainly right about the first two. This is indeed a very rough draft, sometimes these things make more sense in my head than they do on paper. The summer and the blizzard are both of that sort.

"Branded with laziness" is possible. Ever heard the line "Why don't you just learn to speak english?" It is something one can be branded with, particularly in the case of what this poem means. Of course, if I have to explain that it probably means I have done a poor job of crafting the poem.

Thank you for your help! I hope to revise this soon.

I'm going to have to disagree with the reviews above, actually.

First, punctuation and form in a poem should always be optional -- entirely up to the poet, and used to whatever effect the poet wants it to go toward. Same goes for imagery. The wonderful thing about poetry is that it has, literally, no rules. In this poem, I felt that the entire point was the lack of imagery, the empty lack of any meaning at all, because when you can barely understand the language, everything is just words. In all honesty, I thought this was near-perfect at being exactly what it was supposed to be.

The only thing I would change, and this is only for clarity's sake, because it took me a little while to understand that this was about a literal second language, is in the first stanza, to perhaps emphasize 'I could not hear' with some sort of poetic device or imagery (there's that word again). The sooner you can convey that confused, hollow feeling of I don't understand to the reader, the better, and it will make the sparseness of the poem all the stronger.

Overall, though, I loved it.