Transgender Day of Remembrance

You did a fantastic work on this poem. I loved every word and the emotion that you have put into it. I also loved that you wrote a poem for the LGBT. It's awesome so keep up your awesomeness and your great work!

It's a really emotioanal and beautiful-in it's own way- poetry you have written. I think it's good and it lefte me speechless and I usually don't get speechless,great job!

Hi!!

So, I am not transgender or know anyone personally who is. But, nonetheless, I do understand that there are people who are. But, they are still people too! I hate it when others can't except reality!

Anyway, this is really emotional and hit me hard. There should be no discrimination yet people still discriminate! This is what I hate!

Well, again, it hit me hard and I now understand. Also, I love how you repeated the beginning and end. I feel it made it give off a more sentimental and meaningful approach.

Great job! I love how you bring it back around. How the first half and second half sort of reflect each other.

I read this a while a go and had to set it down. Sorry! I meant to review this earlier but, I had to set it down....

Good luck and have fun here and YWS where people won't hate! and discriminate! Have a great time!

Thanks for sharing this!!
~Tiff

Hi!

So, I am kind of hesitant to comment on this much, because I know how much this poem means to you. However, I saw a couple of odd things, and you seemed happy to have comments, so I figured I would point out a couple of things! Plus, I think I see a typo, and I figured I would point it out?

"For their transgender brothers and sister,"

Shouldn't it be... "sisters" in the plural?

Also, I've been sewing wayyyy too much as of late, so maybe that's the reason why I had this reaction, but when I saw the word "mend" I thought, "Really? You're going to use that word to describe how soul-tearing and life-shattering it is that someone is dead and can never be brought back again?" It was really touching before that, but this kind of stopped that for me.

I think this is where you were most powerful:

The world is a scary place,

Where it seems to be better,

To kill someone transgender,

Than to be transgender

When will the violence end,

The blows to the head,

Suffication, mutilation, dismemberment, rape,

All because they were being themselves,

When will the peace begin

An honourable poem, to say the least. I love how you took careful time to make sure that everything worked in a poetic, yet fluent way. And you chose a great topic! There were little to no spelling mistakes, but there is something I'd like to check.
"Be we understand them"
I wasn't sure if this was a type error or not, but other than that, nothing really seemed out of place. Overall, great job!

This poem hits me especially hard as I am transgender myself, and am currently observing the transgender day of remembrance. It's hard to think of all of my brothers, sisters, and siblings who have died because of the result of some people's ignorance and bigotry. I especially felt the lines;

The world is a scary place,

Where it seems to be better,

To kill someone transgender,

Than to be transgender

Hello.

So, you have a fantastic topic. Very important topic, too. We need more awareness of this day, and we need people talking about trans deaths. They do need to be remembered and honoured.

My one issue with this poem is: it lacks the details and concrete images that'll make it impactful.

Yes, I am aware not all conversations about trans people should include a vocabulary lesson or statistics or be for those who don't know anything about the issue. That's not really what I'm suggesting here. You don't need to add in a bunch of statistics, because statistics don't always make an impact.

However, you do need to tell us stories, which this poem lacks. You need to give us something that grabs us and makes us hurt for all the people you're honouring.

My favourite ever remembrance poem is In Flander's Fields. This poem does a lot of things right: it gives us a setting, it names characters, and it calls for remembrance. Even if you weren't personally touched by WWI, you can still feel/understand the reason why it was so painful. There's a sense of ache for the poem, a sense that these people had their lives cut short. That's what makes it a good poem.

Now while basically everyone knows why Flander's Fields is important and why the first world war is terrible, the poem is still relatively contained and doesn't necessarily require you to know details about the war. The imagery gives us a very clear setting, and the poem personifies the dead to make us ache for them. That ache is the key to good poetry in general— it's what guarantees a poem has reached into our hearts and made us feel something, made us sympathize with the character in the poem even if we don't know the full situation around it.

There is no sense of ache in this poem. There's nothing I can really say reached out and grabbed me, made me feel something, made me go "yeah, these deaths are terrible." I know the statistics around trans deaths, but I didn't really feel them resonated in here.

Dig deeper. Make us ache for all these deaths. Give us some specifics, tell us stories from the dead's perspectives, give us something that reaches out, takes our heart, and makes us care. Once you do that, you'll go from having an okay poem to a great poem. This has nothing to do with making every conversation about trans issues accessible to the mass population, and everything to do with improving poetry. Ache makes good poetry. Specifics and concrete images make good poetry. Add those in, and you'll have something amazing.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

~Rosey

Hey! Welcome to YWS.

I'm Aley, and I'll be reviewing your poem today. First thing first, since this is your first poem on YWS and I'm probably one of the first reviews you've read about your work, I'd like to tell you a little more about why and how we review. When we review on YWS, we review critically, so a lot of your feedback is going to be looking at how to improve and what is not yet perfect with a poem, but we also use a critiquing sandwich, which you can read more about here: The YWS Critique Sandwich and because we're reviewing critically, we're reviewing to help people improve, so our motives are to aid you as best we can in improving whatever craft you choose to put up here.

Onto the review. I think you really captured the idea of "togetherness" in this poem because you chose to go with a lot of "us" and "we" pronouns which was a very good idea considering the content is about remembering everyone as a group. This really opens it up and also lets you pop your message when you say "Light your candle,/lower your head" because of the sudden shift to "your" and I actually really like this aspect of your poem.

I feel like the poem overall could use some improvement on the method of delivery. The words themselves are pretty bland aside from a few lines, and they're not very rich in detail. For example, "These are the people we'd bring back if we could" could be about anyone, by anyone, and about any group. "They were not bad" is another case and point. We understand from the context that the people who "were not bad" were the transgender community who lost their lives, but this could be about any group, and if we want to make this poem about one specific group, I feel like we have to diversify and dig in deeper to the message you're trying to say.

Your words, at the current moment, are pretty generic, so if you challenged yourself to rewrite the poem in a way that only you could write it, I think you'll find yourself a lot freer from some of the constraints this poem shows. Right now, you have a comma or a period at the end of nearly every line and those lines when you don't have one are the ones where it's sort of a verbal stop. This isn't what I'd recommend. I'd like to see you write this less as a song, where lines equal a pause, and more as a poem where the pause is minimal at best at the end of a line so we keep reading on, and we connect all of the sentences together. Taking away that barrier at the end of every line will make the flow of this poem much better in a sense of getting through it in one reading. One way we can do this is to write the poem as prose initially, put in the proper grammatical marks, the proper grammar capitalization, then find the points in the poem which make the individual line a whole idea, not a whole sentence, but a whole notion or thing, and break it up that way. For instance one line you could have in this would be "brothers and sisters" because that's is a very religious message that people would associate well with for the most part. You'd then leave "for their" on the line before it and potentially break that line up in a different spot too.

In summary, I think this poem has potential, but I'd like to see it less structured and more modern.

Welcome to YWS. I hope to see more from you.
-Aley

This is beautiful. I'm a supporter of the LGBTQ community, and I love to see things like this. Restores my faith in humanity.

Sad as it is, I'm required to nitpick a little. At the beginning, you don't have any commas at the end of the phrases, but you have them throughout the rest of the poem. The sort of thing throws people off and distracts them from the message of your poem.

My transgender friend Axel just came back to school after his f2m top-half operation! His voice is so low and he has stubble