Young Writers Society

Hello! This was a lot shorter than I expected but there is so much one can take away from this that can't be taken from a page long poem.

For the first line, you introduce Death and then the rest of the poem is describing where Death is--basically, everywhere. That is cleverly written.

You use diction people may avoid because of its simplicity but by using it, you make your short poem strong and meaningful.


Overall, I agree with alliyah. I was like "That's it?!"

Great job!

Hey Chaos! First off welcome to Young Writers Society! I'm alliyah, one of the junior moderators on site, if you ever run into any trouble navigating the site, please feel free to reach out.

So let's get to the review!

First off, I like your poetic voice - it's brooding, a bit formal, and you really lean into imagery.
My main critique of this poem is going to be Where's the rest!?.

You've got a great few lines here, but it doesn't quite feel like it has developed into a story or a message yet. I know sometimes when you've got just a couple lines, it can be tempting to just "leave them be" rather than risk ruining them by adding too much else, but I think with the lines you've got, it would be worth trying to expand this piece.

Looking at what you have so far - I think the first line is the strongest.

You establish a personification of Death and the speaker being death. There are so many questions I have about this - is this just how the speaker feels? Or is the speaker really death? are they more a grim reaper or just the presence of people dying? How do they feel about their role?

I love that phrasing "carrion winds" - it's unique and certainly poetic.

Next line - you've got "ashes dance upon the wind" - while it's a beautiful image to imagine, I've heard it before. Surprisingly this is a poetic image/phrase that folks use again and again. In a short poem it's best to stay away from "used language" as it ends up not saying as much as it could. I wonder if you could replace the verb "dance" with something more out of the ordinary. Also If you just take the sentence as a whole - I'm not sure this poem makes sense. Simplified, this is what your poem is saying: "I am death in the wind as ash on the air and fireflies spirit away souls of the dead" <- that doesn't make sense all together, so you might want to take a second look at the phrasing. Maybe it could be "I am death in the carrion winds and the ash on the air" ? The "as" just doesn't make sense to me grammatically.

Moving on, the fireflies line has great imagery - to imagine fireflies taking away souls is really interesting. Again I think you need to double check the phrasing of this line though as it's a bit award.

Now your final line hold a lot of implications - what does it mean for death to take away the lives or souls of the "lost" - what does lost mean in this context? Also death often seems to take away the lives of the aware just as often as the unaware, so I think it's actually a bit odd what's being chosen to emphasise. It'd be great to dig in a little deeper here.

Well I look forward to reading more of your poetry! If you have questions about this review - feel free to reach out. I left more criticism than praise, just because I find this often gives the author more to work with in revisions and improvement. But I did quite enjoy this piece.

~alliyah