Young Writers Society

PART I
The witch.
The enchantment.
Muttered words, the wave of a wand
And I feel a strange transformation
Coming over me - a metamorphosis
I have wings a beak
What is this? How did this happen?

Caged by this strange prison
My mind is blank, drawing no answers
To this new riddle
My prison not made of iron
Nor wood, nor rope -
A cage never heard nor seen
Nor thought of as a cage before
A cocoon of soft and downy snow
White feathers that surround me,
Enclose me in their gentle,
Inescapable grip.
I struggle uselessly
There is no way I can escape
From this unheard of prison
The only reward for my struggles
Is white, soft and downy snow
Drifting from my body
Causing no one pain but I
And not winning me even a taste of freedom.

PART II
At first I thought
Misery would always haunt me
I searched for a way out
A way to go back to the world of men
No longer could I speak the speech of men
No longer could I eat their food or drink their sweet wine.
Soon, in my travels, though, I learned the thrill of flight
And found it more intoxicating than
The whitest wine.
I found that weeds
Pulled from the cooling box
Of mud below the surface of a pond
Was not really so bad, after all
And those handsome males
Their long necks stretched
Reflecting the sunshine off their white elegance,
Preening before my queenly beauty -
I grew to love their attentions.
So on that day, so long waited for, so soon forgotten,
A stranger came to my pond
I cried out with my great voice
and struggled against his grip.
But he overcame me and with gentle yet firm lips
Gave me the kiss of freedom
The kiss of death
I was transformed and wept
tears of freshwater and blood
As I sighed and waved farewell
To the companions of my enchantment
And I always remember, now, to this day,
The feel of the wind in my feathers
As I flew above the green earth
Feeling like an unearthly queen
And thought
Is this what it's like?
To be a Swan Princess?

Interesting stuff, there. First of all, don't label your parts. I mean, put the Roman numerals I and II there, but nix the "PART". Usually these divisions are used for different perspectives or times and whatnot, but your second section, although it conveys different feelings, is mostly just a continuation of your first. I would rather have you not divide the sections up like that. Of course, don't make the whole thing one humongous intimidating block of text; divide it up into smaller stanzas.

You don't need to capitalize the first letter of each stanza. If it's a continuation from the line above, feel free to make it lowercase. It can interrupt the flow and be confusing for the reader, especially with the way you have sparingly used punctuation. Punctuation will also help this poem a lot.

I liked how you created the transition from prison to acceptance to transformation again.

Colleen

I liked it, hehe, it reminds me of a childrens movie...but I'm not too sure if that's where you go the inspiration from so....

Yeah....punctuation would help a fair bit. Like

Coming over me - a metamorphosis ;

Would help, I think. It's just one of the easier ones that I spotted, skimming through it again. It's just an idea, a hint hon, otherwise, it was well written.

~Chibi

Very interesting; I like it. I like how you took the classic fairy tale cliche of a princess becoming a swan and made it... different. This has some really lovely imagery,too.
You should definitely read through it again and correct punctuation errors(there were only a few, though) and I agree with Colleen that you should use roman numerals. It just looks better, for some reason.
Other than that, this was an enjoyable read. Keep writing!