Young Writers Society

This is Kaos here for a review!

I have seen the red leaves fall

Like blood seeping into a battleground

Twirling, then drifting down

As if they’ve been sown there.

This is an interesting way to start the poem, but I don't really know where the 'battleground' simile relates to the rest of the poem and it feels kind of out there because of it. You have a lack of punctuation here in these first four lines, which I think you should fix. The last thing I had to say about these lines is that the third and fourth lines felt a bit awkward, and the fourth confused me with "as if they're been sown there" because the readers don't know where "there" is. Is it the ground, is it still them drifting in the air? Clarify yourself better with what you're saying here.

I have seen the white snow come

Like cold pricks of bigotry

Burying the small voices of the black earth

The small, green leaves that show hope.

I caught onto the style or pattern that you chose to write in, and I suggest dividing these into stanzas so that they stand out better on their own. I didn't particularly hate or like your choice of having it be this way, though I do have to say that it does get more repetitive in a negative sense throughout the poem. It was interesting for your choice to describe the snow like bigotry, and I felt it was a little out of place. Another choice that I was wondering about is the 'black earth'. I didn't really get what it meant or how it affected the poem. The stanza does what it was intended to do but nothing more, and that's what disappointed me. The format you created restricts, or makes you restrict the imagery of the poem.

With it being this way, the lines didn't have very much strength to them. The imagery could have been expanded on instead of it being bare. My suggestion is to add little details in instead of changing it all with large edits because doing that for all of them would help it overall instead of you having to create the stanzas over again. One thing that I wanted to mention was your use of colors and I think you can use that to your advantage. Give us more than red if you're going to be using it as one of your primary sources to describe in the poem. Along with this: Don't use just color to describe everything. There's more you can do. Think of all your five senses and apply them into the poem where you can, it helps create more of an atmosphere.

I hope I helped and have a great day!