Okay, now I feel bad about virtually everything I'm about to say because everyone has been like "omg this is amazing and beautiful" but I don't really bother leaving reviews if that's what I have to say, because it's nice to hear but not constructive. So. Please forgive me for what follows.
The message in this poem is a little confused as we follow the girl at the beginning to the end of her life. It starts off with the little girl longing to fly, but when her mother tells her she can’t, she decides it’s true. This message sticks with her throughout adulthood—we see her as a young woman, hopeless, overwhelmed by life, and she no longer has the desire to touch the sky. Even as an old woman, dying in front of her granddaughter, she doesn’t believe her own words when she says they’ll both be all right. Then she suddenly remembers her childhood dream and tells the granddaughter she wants to touch the sky before she dies, which seems like a hopeful turnaround…except then it turns out that the way she touches the sky is to die. Which seems like a bummer.
So I’m not sure whether the message here is supposed to be one of hope, despair, or a more spiritual sort of hope wherein death is not the end. It got obscured by the passage of time and the conflicting ideas the main character has about touching the sky throughout her life and the way this conflict is resolved by her touching it upon her death.
Additionally, the human desire and inability to touch the sky is an old idea—which is fine, except that you haven’t done much here to spruce it up and make it fresh. The little girl wants to touch the sky; her mother laughs at her and tells her it’s impossible. Since we don’t have anything specific about the character to latch onto and care about, the poem comes across as generic. I need some detail. Specific imagery, strong figurative language, some detail about our main character that makes her unique.
As a starting point, let me point out what I thought was the best stanza.
It was dark outside, with twinkling stars,
they all lit up the sky.
They lit up the sky, like shining young girls-
girls that wanted to fly.
Twinkling stars is a better image than anything else in the poem, and I like the comparison of the stars to “shining young girls” with hope. This could be a starting point for the rest of the poem, in terms of bringing in stronger imagery, more figurative language, and more detail. You can also use more complex words. Understand me: I’m absolutely not saying you should go through this with a thesaurus and replace every word with a “bigger” word. It’ll be obvious if you do, and it can throw off your rhymes (which were done quite well, by the way) without even adding anything.
However, see where you can replace weak words with strong words. For example, “very pretty” and “very smart” in the first stanza. “Very” is a word we generally need to avoid in writing, because the presence of “very” alerts us to the fact that there’s probably a stronger, more concise word we could use. For example, “beautiful” or “lovely” instead of “very pretty.” A simile or metaphor describing someone’s beauty would be even better.
Of course, that’ll probably throw off the rhyme and rhythm. Start small and see where you can make your language stronger without hurting the rhyme scheme. Or work on one stanza at a time, deciding what is most important to get across to readers and then crafting the stanza until it both does its job and sounds the way you want it to.
Blue
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