Young Writers Society

This is Kaos here for a review!

I know that you are scared
but dear child don't you know,
that the darkness is
your one true friend.

I found this first stanza rather generic in what it was trying to get across. The stanza feels like you're trying to have a voice with the "dear child" for the word choice to me, but by trying to do this it doesn't have any sort of style. The "darkness" isn't described and is rather vague, and so is the part about being scared. Some of these words could be replaced with their stronger synonyms, like "scared" darkness" and maybe even "friend", but you shouldn't do that for every word, and rather what feels right. This stanza is broad, which makes it hard to find the meaning because there isn't any detail here.

When you get older
the darkness is
a gentle hug
that whispers
nothing's here.

Again, this stanza is also vague. I suggest chopping up the lines, perhaps by ending the third line with a period and adding a bit more punctuation to here. What is the "darkness" that you talk about in this poem? You may know what you're talking about, but what the reader knows this far into the poem is very basic. We don't know who the "dear child" that was addressed in the first stanza is, and you can't expect to leave a line like that without the question being asked. It seems that there isn't really a "dear child" in actuality that the speaker wrote this to and it was trying to make this sound nicer, but if so, I suggest you take it out.

The fifth line should have a comma after it, and I suggest the last line to be in quotations. There isn't any vivid imagery here for the reader to imagine. What is the gentle hug like? Are the arms of the darkness loose? Tell us more instead of dropping a line of imagery after you start it. Expand on it further.

Right now, the darkness is nothing
but a place where monsters hide.
Though, watch as you grow,
that darkness is a show,
that reflects your every growth.

The rhyming in this stanza didn't work for me in the third and fourth lines. If you're going to rhyme in a poem, a good rule of thumb is that you either have to have a specific pattern where you rhyme at every fourth line or something of that sort, or you rhyme throughout the whole poem. It just feels awkward to shove a few rhymes into a poem that wasn't rhyming before.

What are "monsters" to you? This could be many different things and you don't describe what they look like or what they do or how they sound. A good way to think of imagery is to think of your five senses of something that you want to describe, and kind of go through them in your head and you can use those in the poem. Some senses may be more dominant than others, like sight, but it's a good way to think of or try and come up with things to describe. Those are some of the variables of imagery, and there are more, but if you try and think like that I think the imagery would strengthen.

One day, you will say:
that I am not afraid.
For now, rest your head
and snuggle in your bed.
Close your eyes
and knot your ties.

Again, I suggest cutting out the rhyming so that you can describe more. What I would have liked to see is some more line variation where there are long and short lines all around because it gets boring when it's all the same length. The colon in the first line wasn't really needed and I feel you could have worded it like this:

One day, you will say,
"I am not afraid"

Instead of doing the colon you can put it in quotation marks and it'll flow better like that. I thought that for a poem that was trying to be dark, it didn't really accomplish that and rather felt sort of like a lullaby instead. I wanted you to describe the dark and everything of that sort. The "rest your head, snuggle in your bed" really softened it down for me even more. It isn't really dark as it seems it was supposed to be intended to be, in my opinion. Create the atmosphere of what the darkness is like, talk more about what you say.

I hope I helped and have a great day.