Soul of a Warrior

I usually don't review poetry. In fact, I never review poetry. You are my first-ever poetry review. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I guess we'll find out.

But the title of this caught my eye. I've recently taken to slam poetry, and there's a poem by Taylor Mali that I watched recently. For some reason, my brain decided to connect the two. I was initially disappointed then I saw that the two are not related, but I got over that disappointment before too long.

Again, I never review poetry, and I don't know where to begin in terms of critique that you could take away and use on another day. Aside from mentioning that

Wherever I go; I spare no-ones life.

that should be a comma instead of a semicolon, and that

I do so upon instinct; in combat I come alive.

the rhythm here was off compared to the rest of the piece--probably because of the stress pattern of 'upon' and then 'come alive'--

I don't have anything on the traditional critique end. But I can tell you some things that I love about it. Chief among those things is the creation of character. I had reservations about him until I came to the line about God and the Devil being one in the same. I believe that's where I decided I'd be responding, because that's when the character became more than just a cliche warrior but believable and alive to me. And perhaps because I watched V for Vendetta recently, the last line also got me--not so much for the first clause of it, which was typical with the war and struggle and all, two nice loaded words, but because of the idea of this warrior being alone and without a home.

In the end, I got a sense of this man without a place in the world, who can only feel alive when fighting, and yet despite all the wars around him, he's still not content. And because I read fantasy, this character was incredibly appealing to me. He inspired me and I'd go write a story about him. Which is evidence to me of this being a job well done.

(I could also rave about your use of parallelism and such, but that seems counterproductive.)

Anyway, I enjoyed this a lot. Let me know if you have any questions or comments! And if you just want to bounce ideas off me or something, I'm open to that as well.

Rach

(P.S. You also need an apostrophe in "no one's".)

Well, I'm not going to throw out a long response like to one above because they pretty much covered everything. At this moment I'm listening to Mumford and Sons' - Little Lion Man, and well, this poem fits perfectly with it. I loved the message you conveyed and the lines sort of flowed, but as I'm finding out that's easier said than done. Good Job. Keep Writing!

i love this! its sooooooo good

keep writing