Still Standing Strong
The castle was built for beauty
Piles of intricately carved sand towering high
One long, elegant staircase winding gracefully
And a lily perched top
~
But the waves were not so gentle
They teased the poor pretty piece
Pulling it apart bit by bit
Then devouring it whole
In one fatal gulp
~
The children came running back
Tears staining their delicate faces
But their eyes shone with determination
The will to fight on
~
The castle was built for strength
Armies of sand packed with force
One deep trench surrounding the fortress
And a glass shard pierced top
~
But the waves never turned down a battle
They struck out with a militia of might
Pounding their swords through the fortress
Then swallowing it whole
In one damaging gulp
~
The children came running back
Hope streaming from their faces
When witnessing a piece of their fortress
Still standing strong
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139,825 Literary Works • 672,772 Reviews
Hello. Here as requested.
First off, little nit picky thing: you have a rhyme with beauty/gracefully, and a beginning-of-word rhyme with force/fortress, but otherwise there is no rhyming here. Pick rhyme/not rhyme and stick to it. Switching between the two, even in such a small quantity, really throws off flow. Instead of reading the poem, I stopped reading at stanza 2 and counted rhymes to see if this was supposed to rhyme or not.
As for the content itself.
I feel like this piece is trying to be poignant commentary, but it's a little limited by the short lines, four to five line stanzas, and repetition. I wrote many many many many poems like this when I first started writing poetry, and you can still see them in my portfolio. This feels like it's trying very hard to be A Poem without much thought put into whether or not it's poetry.
By this I mean we have all of the boxes for A Poem ticked. A Poem usually has stanzas that are 4-5 lines, usually involves some vague rhyme scheme, some repetition, etc. But poetry has flow, and emotion, and generally stirs something in the reader.
We're getting events laid out to us, relatively plainly at that. There's hints of emotion here and there, but they're not particularly internal. By internal I mean filtered through the lens of a narrator— note, however, this is my own personal bias when it comes to poetry. It's very possible to have a strong poem from an external perspective, but it still requires some sense of physical feeling, some sort of tension.
Poetry, much like prose, requires tension. There's a sense of tension here, and some message about permanence vs impermanence, but there really isn't a whole lot of, well, emotion. Here is an article on editing for that very thing.
So, all in all, I'd say to loosen up a little bit. Don't try to write A Poem. Try to write poetry, something you believe in. It's scary to consider being vulnerable, but it's worth it. Promise.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
~Rosey
Thanks for the review.