Young Writers Society

Hey Riellehn! It is absolutely awesome to read your poem. Your poem holds a vivid imagination. And it expresses strong emotions and feelings. I like your poem. Each and every line of your poem expresses a unique feeling corpse.
"I have two eyes to see
All the traps that caught me
All the mistakes I made
The fatal miscalculations" I really like these lines in your poem.....

You use a lot of strong/intense imagery in this poem, and though I got the general idea that the narrator is the martyr themselves, I will admit that I had a bit of a hard time figuring out what the main message was. Is the narrator feeling some sort of confusion or guilt as to having the lives of others in their hands? This is a very free-flowing poem which may have to do with why I struggled to come up with a solid interpretation (which isn't necessarily a bad thing; I just personally had to think a little bit more about what main message you were trying to convey).

The last line of the poem, "Let the martyr be your guide", is a very strong and final line but I don't feel that it encompasses the idea of the narrator's self-deprecation very well; in a couple of earlier stanzas, he asks "Why leave your life / In the hands of a corpse? / Have you that much faith / In these brittle bones?" It just seems a bit contradictory when taken alongside the context of the rest of the poem, but again, this is just how it's coming across to me.

I did like the fact that you broke up the stanzas rather than leaving it as one chunk of text; that made it easier to follow a rhythm while I was reading through. I also like the very deliberate vocabulary choices you made -- "fatal miscalculations" and "suffer the whip" stood out to me a lot the first time I read through it.

All in all I think that a few more details would add a bit more consistency to your message, but please accept my review with a grain of salt -- poetry is open to interpretation and I very much enjoyed this piece, even if I had a hard time dissecting a few parts of it. Good job!! <3

I had a little bit of a hard time following what was being described in this poem -

I believe that it's about a dead person who is zombie-fied and carries around their old friend. There are some very interesting specific lines in here - like "I am the assassin" which makes me wonder if they killed themselves or are preparing to kill the subject - but there's just not quite enough links in here to help me make it all make sense. I couldn't follow why the character was connected to all these different people or really what they were reflecting on.

I think this poem might work a bit better as a short story or paragraph-poetry (with long lines) because right now it felt a bit like the short lines were inhibiting you from telling whatever the background story is, so that it all felt a bit disconnected.

There are a few pieces of imagery, like the eyes and the leg description but I think you could push the creativity on those a bit, by describing them in more interesting words as well.

Lastly, the word "martyr" has a very specific religious connotation, and there was really a lack of any religious imagery in the poem from what I could tell, so it sort of felt like a mis-matched metaphor. A martyr is someone who dies for their religious belief - and it didn't feel like from what the person was saying that the speaker died for any belief (please correct me if I'm wrong) -- given the case that there are actual contemporary martyrs in the world -- like the 11 Christian Nigerians killed on Christmas this year, it even felt like an uncomfortable connection because the word is so charged with meaning. This could be used for the poem's benefit if you showed how the speaker was somehow a martyr for their beliefs, but just to use it disconnected from it's belief makes it look like an idea is being thrown around to be edgy.

Anyway, I think you have some really good instincts for line breaks and also for getting a specific narrative - I just wanted the story to be cleared-up a little and then the imagery and figurative language boosted too - this will bring your poem to the next level.

Looking forward to your next poem!

alliyah