Young Writers Society

Hey there! Just popping in for a quick review

To start off, I really enjoyed reading this! My favorite stanza was the fifth where you wrote

Tell me
As you sip your tea
Standing right in front of me
Did you think that life would go so slow

Hi silverquill12!
This poem gave me the chills as I went on reading it. It was a nice combination of the independent thoughts and the flow of the poem and there was surely a chilling end to the verse. However, I would like to give you a few suggestions as to how you can improve the poem. However, this is your creation. So please feel free to ignore these improvements if you please. Here I go:

1. At the end of each stanza which questions the reader, please put a question mark. It is a big turn off when the stanza begins with a question and doesn't end with a question mark.

2. Please add the proper punctuation at the end of each line to help in the comprehension.

3. The flow of the poem, although kind of steady, fluctuates a lot. Usually a poem starts at a certain emotion, builds it up and then ends at the desired emotion. Or goes through a smooth transition from one emotion to the other. This one, on the other hand, seems highly haphazard. It's like I can see the thoughts just randomly appearing in your head as you write. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not. If it was, please feel free to ignore the following suggestion. But if it wasn't, I suggest you to change the order of the stanzas this way:
If we number the stanzas from 1-11, I think the order should have been:
2, 3, 5, 4, 6, 7, 1, 9, 8, 10, 11.
This way the poem goes in a transition from things that make us think (2, 3, 5), to the speeding up of life (4, 6), to thinking about life (7), to thinking of the lark and the crow: the bad omen indicating that the poem is about to get dark (1), to things beginning to get dark as the narrator realises the truth of her (9), to the dark forest that the consecutive pains leads to (8), to the contemplation of death (10), and finally, to death itself (11). I think this would create a better flow of thought and remove the haphazardness while still leaving the impact.

4. Capitalization of all lines seems amateurish and is against the rules of grammar. So I suggest that you capitalize the first line of each stanza alone.

5. In stanza 4, it should be "with the balls".

6. In stanza 5, "reach a hand" doesn't sound right grammatically and gives a weird vibe. Perhaps you could replace it with "reach out"?

7. In stanza 8, it should be "cold, where" by the rules of grammar.

8. There seems to be a problem between the first person and the second person pronouns. The whole poem goes with "you" facing the problems, "you", thinking about life, "you" feeling cold and sad etc, but in stanza 10, it's "how many days of living do I owe". Why would "I" be thinking of death when "you" were the one feeling the pain? Then again in stanza 11, there's a mismatch. It was "I" thinking of death in stanza 10 but "your knife" cutting deep in stanza 11. Then again, it's "before I go". Why would "I" be going when it was "your knife" that made the cut? Please remove this confusion.

9. You don't have to end with "Tell me" after stanza 11. Stanza 11 ends on a chilling note and to let that be maintained in the reader's heart, you should just leave it like that. The last "Tell me" is a turn off that way because it doesn't let that feeling remain and seems unnecessarily added.

I'd like to state again how good this poem is. I also want to appreciate your writing skills at the age of 15 and I hope you flourish in the future.
Keep writing!

P.S. I'd like it if you reply to this review.