Young Writers Society

Hey there, Story! Do not fear, for Lily is here!

Though after reading this, well, you don’t have much to fear. You have a really good poem here.

Let me just start with a couple little nitpicks:

How high can I get
Before I puncture the sky

I like your opening line here but I think you could improve on it simply by really emphasizing the pause at the end of your first line with something as small as a dash. It gives the reader a minute the let the question sit on their tongues. Other than that, it’s a great opening, especially with the use of the word “puncture.”

A bridge from here to There –
The Inevitable There that
Hovers past the Universe,

This was the one part of the whole poem that sort of threw me off. Something about bolded words in general make me a feel a bit iffy but it also has something to do with the capitalization. I can tell that you’re obviously trying to emphasize the bolded words but, it just kind of glares off the page and you won’t want the reader to feel like they’re being forced to look at the bolded words just because they’re bold, ya know? I don’t really have anything to recommend to you on how to fix it but I would definitely take a little time and look at other ways to emphasize what you want to emphasize. Maybe you don’t need to emphasize at all and you can rely on the repetition of ‘there’ or adding a dash right before ‘that.’

Line Breaks

Otherwise, the only other comment that I have is to be careful about making your line breaks. Sometimes while I was reading, I found myself wondering about why you decided to end a line at the point where you did. I guess the simplest way I can say it is to show you what I mean:

How high can I get
Before I puncture the sky
And cause the stratosphere
To callous and swell
With thick gray clouds
That spread (over the horizon)
Like a black-and-purple bruise?

Do you see what I mean, everything seemed a hair off to me (though I did add that little part as that second to last line otherwise seemed too short) without changing any of what you were trying to say. But every time I ended a line, I always felt like I was getting this precursor to the next line, pausing, and then continuing into the next line.

Otherwise, you’ve produced a wonderful poem and if you have any questions about anything I said up there, feel free to ask.

~lilymoore