Young Writers Society

I like how you put this poem under "lyrical" because it is perfectly musical. The wording and the flow feels so sweeping.

I definitely feel this on a personal level, fathers and daughters can have troubled relationships. Its hard to think of what your missing and not wonder what could have been.

This poem I think deserved a bit more mystery than what you gave it, but in its simplicity your soul truly shines through which is the important part of writing. Keep at it!

Hey!

I'm here for a couple reasons, first, I keep seeing your reviews around the place that are all analytical. You get a lot more out of poems than I do. Second, I want to give you a review that can show you the other side of the coin so to speak. I mean, don't get me wrong, your analytical reviews are great, but we are here to improve poems too, so if it isn't their point, then your review tells them they missed the mark, but not how to fix it.

This poem gives us a lot of details that allow us to pick up on the fact that our narrator is a young child who misses their father probably, on father's day as the other reviewer picked up.
"From the fatherless daughter" is a bold, simple way to tell the reader exactly what they are getting into, even though it is already in the title. In other words, that part of the line is rather repetitive. We can collect that the father is not around from the line "because I don't know you" and without saying that the daughter is directly fatherless, we can infer more degrees of neglect to attract a wider demographic of readers.

We can pick up that the child is young because they feel pressured to feel grateful for the father still, which either means they are young in spirit and still want to hold onto the idealistic 'parents are our moral compasses and should be respected' or they have yet to recognize and accept that fathers are flawed people too, and even with a father, their life may still have been "a life of tears" with "empty laughter" and "lonely nights of just wishing you were here" or "wishing I knew who you were" or "why you never loved me" for any number of reasons. Some of those include mental illness, general neglect, PTSD, army duty, work and depression, a strict family life, or even an unsociable father. There are some fathers who, although they're not harmful in any way, just never talk about themselves and to children, they are just the father, the fixer of the house. There are other fathers who just spend their whole lives in the garage. So, that being said, the narrator has yet to come to these realizations which means they probably haven't had an opportunity to explore other family's lives deep enough to see these cases.

Now I'll say this. I know that this is a personal poem for you, but I'd like you to recognize that when I say "the narrator" I am not talking about you, I am talking about the persona THIS POEM about THIS situation has lead me to believe. This says nothing about you because words can only do so much. Words are imperfect, they are symbols, translated to ideas, translated through connotations and denotations and twenty million filters, and as such, it's like looking at 9 puzzle pieces of a 1000 piece jigsaw.

So, onto the review.

Overall you have a good story going through this. It's very well connected and meaningful to those who have experienced it.

I feel like you could use with some punctuation work for a few reasons. One reason is that, as this article by Kyllorac says, Pray Perpetuate Poetry Punctuation , punctuation is key to clear communication. Now while there are a variety of ways to do some grammar things, like I cover in this article Capitalization in Poetry including punctuation, capitalization, and even stanza breaks, I think you could do better going one or two ways in this.

Most of the time line capitalization does not go with a lack of punctuation because it is such a traditional formal style. The ellipsis also rarely goes in poetry well without meaning that the line could be repeated in front of the rest of the lines in that stanza.

I could walk...
across the sun
above the moon
through the valley of death,
all because you were with me.

I could almost...
but it was gone again
as fast as a hand pulled back
from a hot pan.

Hello! shiney1 here

Overall Impression

This poem. This is deep, and so realistic. Father's Day is coming up, and while it's a joyous time for many, it's an old wound for others. I felt the pain, resentment, and longing the poem tried to convey, and like how it acknowledges the fact that not everyone knows who their father is, or has a good father. The poem's wording was not simple, but was not complex either, which worked very well for the subject! Putting things in terms that are too elaborate can make connecting with the reader more difficult, and that's not what happened here.

Nitpicks

I don't really have any nitpicks at all. Grammar, punctuation, and flow seem fine to me. If I could choose only one thing to poke at is the first line.

From the fatherless daughter that never could…