Young Writers Society

Hey Arc . . . is it just me or did you not paste all of this piece over? You've ended it really abruptly -so abruptly I feel like you've done something that's SERIOUSLY wrong in pasting. You might want to look into it.

But even so, your formatting needs work (or is that just YWS -I'll be safe and say it is). So does your punctuation. I won't be specific about your punctuation, but something that helps me with fixing punctuation is A: Find out what specific punctuation exactly does to your writing B: Read the piece while thinking about what exactly I want it to sound like. Edit accordingly. I guarantee 100% better punctuation.

Anyway, this is just a comment/ review. Nice work so far . . . make sure you finish it/ post the rest of it soon (and then ask me back for a real review). By 'Keep writing' here, I really do mean 'KEEP WRITING'. You need to -_-

~Black~

Okay, please bear with me until the end of the review. First I want to get all of the nit-picky things out of the way then I'll tell you what I liked. To preface my critique, I'll say that the idea is a good one, and this poem has a good pace. I'll expand more on what I like later.

This poem sounds incomplete because it doesn't have a "then" statement. You start out with If, and if is one of those terms that requires a complementary statement. If you were my son, then you would have been great. I could have saved you, if you let me. It's just that sort of word. Having that word, and then only having the discussion of the holy race kind of loses sight of what that complementary statement (typically beginning with then unless it can be omitted) would have been.

With that being said, the poem itself could use some work as well. First off, even though it sounds incomplete, you have a phrase in here that I don't see as necessary, "in your mind" to be specific. Not only does it only tell us that this is all a dream, it doesn't allow us to visually see a holy race, where everyone's lined up ready to bolt and convert the most people, or whatever a holy race might look like to others. Instead, it takes away from the potentially key imagery of physically being thrown in among these holy people to race, and drags us back down to earth, which isn't where we want to be when we're in the skies.

Next, I'm going to pick on your punctuation. You can ignore this if you did it for a reason. Syntax, periods, capitalization: things that need improving in my opinion in this poem punctuation wise. I'll go backwards. Capitalization needs to remain consistent throughout a poem, be it all lowercase, or all uppercase, or just uppercase when it's the start of a new sentence. This poem breaks that. Having "To" and "That" uppercase really breaks up the capitalization scheme you have going, which appears to be at the beginning of every sentence due to the majority of lines being lowercase. This brings me to periods. Personally, I feel like we're missing some here, but we're also missing some of the sentence. Periods are necessary in poetry if you're going to be using punctuation, which you seem to be doing in this poem due to the semi-colon in the middle-ish, because we need to be able to consistently follow the syncopation of the writer's reading. Lastly, syntax. I already went over one point of this, but the syntax I'll be talking about here is a little more specific. "in the skies that takes you up too far" is what I want to point out. "Takes" is something for a singular noun. The dog takes the ball. The dogs takes the ball sounds wrong because, for whatever reason, we have changed a plural noun + verb take (present) to just take instead of takes. Something about simplifying the number of S's on the end of things.

So, what did I like about this poem is that it is a pretty poem. I like that you're trying to make a statement about what would have been, just if you'd given more of a mind to something. It's a wistful poem that dreams big, but it needs to drop the other shoe. If you would have cared about the holy race, you would have been in the skies is more what the poem seems to be trying to say. Instead it's saying If you cared about the holy race, which happens in the skies, [...]? It leaves the reader with an unpleasant hanging feeling. Easy to fix. If you'd like some help fixing it, or just want to take a new look at the direction of the poem, you can always hit me up. I'd be more than willing to help <3