A gift is like a horse, chomping
at its bit and stomping its hooves,
pounding the earth into itself, unceasingly
asking for more. A gift is like a long-tongued flower
so afraid to eat anything that it coaxes food
straight into its purple-eyed mouth. It speaks,
warbling and wan, spitting up swallowed words
all at once and they come out like a tide,
like a long, superfluous note. A gift
is how your house breaks during a storm,
fills with water all the way up to the top of the beds,
the way that the spindly fingers of tress
fold in through the roof – how they plunge
all the way into the carefully laid foundations below.
A gift will apologize, with its waterlogged,
drowned voice, and lay there, unrighting.
I am making you a gift. Building it. Collecting it from the rainbucket.
It has a slow orbit, heavy and gaseous as a planet.
It is silver and honest, a long thought
spread over bread like butter, sewn
like a many-handed quilt, pressed with tender care
between my palms: a discarded prayer.
Sad, gaunt flowers. I am building you a gift,
breathing it out, and it is a low and hungry dusk,
with flower teeth and loud, angry feet,
a quiet thing that, with eyes shining brightly,
looks down at your throat, professes its love.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
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125,041 Literary Works • 672,928 Reviews
Hey there Kat here to review for Team WHY? on this fine day of reviewing
So you have a lot going on here . It's kind of sad in the beginning and it makes me feel like gifts are horrible things that you have had bad experiences with and just really don't want and are trying to give it to someone you hate...but you end with loving them ? Sorry if I don't follow as well as you had hoped but maybe try dividing up the stanzas more and adding more words to help clarify. SORRY >.< but I did enjoy the message I got and all the abundance of imagery here , especially with the storm and the trees and the flooding . the first line reminded me of the saying " don't look a gift horse in the mouth" haha . It was a really romantic and sweet poem though and I felt like there was something passionate about all the sudden things happening going wrong and then ending with love. But I think I am missing something
Thanks for this
~Kat
Your use of metaphor is nearly impeccable! I felt like they were all tangible, all authentic expressions of your love for someone else. I felt how you really wanted to pass something over to someone, and the ways in which you fought to give it to them. Your metaphor is confusingly complicated yet devastatingly simple all at the same time. (Being confusing isn't always a bad thing, esp when it comes to poetry.) The only critique I have is that I wish all the metaphors were tied back together in some way. I saw and felt that a gift was comparable to sad flowers and destroyed houses and horses, but I didn't feel why. Why do you think those are the things that came to mind for you? lol kind of a complicated question, but I feel like that if you probed it a bit it might help. This is a great poem, and I feel like you could take to an even higher level with some creative introspection. Happy writing!
Thats was beautifull, perfect size. Not too long, not too short. I would try to end it differently, give the readers an ending that fits. Im no expert ( or even close to an amature) so i cant review the poetry by itself. Sorry. I will come back when i have mastered the art of poetry. I liked it alot, thats all you need to know from me.
I hope my review helps, you did a great job and i cant wait for more.