the sands of time

Hello! Sophie here to review your work!
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first stanza-the first line implies a beautiful metaphor. the second line and the third both support this detail. the fourth has a hint of pain to it and I love it. this opening is really good because it pulls you in to read it
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second stanza-time flies when your having fun- this connects to your poem because the endless hourglass relates the time to outside knowledge which is good. "the pile at the bottom" makes me wonder how big my pile is. this is really good because it brings some awareness to our eyes
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third stanza-I like this because it draws in the reader and makes them wonder if this is them and they have to stop and think about it. it really is well written
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fourth stanza-I like this because it implies that maybe, the speaker is a bit more powerful then expected and I like this bit of mystery to it. it gives a new side of this poem to the reader to wonder about
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overall- I really liked this and its really well written so good job but watch out for spelling and grammar mistakes

Ohhh this is pretty! I like it

Just a few grammatical errors such as-

A period after the word "fingers" on the second line.
Maybe you want to fix this line:

~but the still slip by so quickly~

^ It's a bit awkward, and I'm not sure if you did this on purpose or not. You could change it to:
"but they still slip by so quickly"
or take out just the "the" so it's :
"but still slip by so quickly"

A comma after:
~as if through an endless hourglass~
and another one on the line underneath.

You wrote the possesive "your" instead of the direct "you're" on that line.

A comma after this:
~but i~

and a comma after:
~i build sand castles~

A period after:
~like the dreams in my head~

and a comma after: ~someday soon~


Other than that I do enjoy this poem! Just fix some grammatical errors and you'll be all set!

My favorite line is :

"some people let the sand slip

through their widely outstretched fingers

not knowing what to do"

AHHH so beautiful!

Hope my review was helpful and encouraging too! Continue writing poems, I like the deep essence of them.

Hi Shikora here with a review.

This was a really nice poem. I really liked how you ran the lines together. It was a calm peaceful poem. I think this poem is good enough to publish. I can tell that this poem was thought through, and I think you did a great job.

but the still slip by so quickly

BlueCat, you are back! <3 And with poetry! Well you know I have to review this.


Nitpicks: Grammar and Spelling
I'll throw this out of the way first so we can get to the content.

There were a few misspellings here and there

"but the still slip by so quickly" ---------- "the" should be "they" I believe.

"and if your not paying attention" --------- "your" should be "you're"

then there were two issues that looked like mistakes on first glance, but are sort of up to your discretion:

"but i
i build sand castles"
-> It's perfectly okay to repeat "I", but having the "I" placed at the end and beginning of a line break is a bit trippy for flow, and I think readers will assume it's a mistake even if it is intentional if you don't use similar repetition somewhere else. If you really want to repeat it, you could put a comma in before and after the second "I" so that people were clear it was intentional, although that would mess up your "no punctuation" pattern. I think the best option would be to eliminate one of the "I"s

"the pile at the bottom
of used time"
-> since "pile" can be used as a verb or noun, on first glance this looks like it was a mistake because the "the" should be "they". On second glance it goes with the following line. When line breaks make you think that there's a mistake in the poem, that can hurt flow if it makes readers go back - sometimes that can be instrumental if you want to distort the reader's expectations or reading, but it can also just be clunky. I'd suggest a synonym for "pile" or leaving out the line break so they can read the whole phrase in one-go.

Interpretation
I interpreted the first two stanzas to be about a speaker who is reflecting on how time is like sand, and how time passes very quickly, despite being able to hold and see each moment as it passes, you end up with a pile of used time.

Now that "used time" metaphor is where the poem got interesting for me. The only thing I could think of for what "used time" is would be memories (although it's not said explicitly, so if that's what you intended, you might end up losing some readers there if they're not willing to dig into your metaphor). And then the speaker says that they actually try to build up this used time/memories like "sand castles" -> sand castles has an interesting connotation because to me that means either

a) they try to make their memories seem pretty in hindsight (a poetry theme I like to use a lot actually!)

b) they try to protect their memories (like a castle protects its content) that's pretty interesting and seems like a melancholy futile task

c) they try to make their memories into something that they can't be (ie. sand can't really be a castle) - that's interesting and evokes a lot of questions for me like what they're motivation for that is.

Then in the last three lines the speaker says "someday soon it will take shape just like i always dreamed" -> I like that here you're using "time markers" (someday soon, always) because that evokes the language from the first half of the poem. But I can't quite figure out what this might mean. The lines sound pretty, but I can't think of what it means in relation to used time. Because used time is something in the past -> and dreams are normally something one hopes for the future -> it seems like there's a disconnect. Like "I hope one day my memories look like what I hope for". It's quite intriguing and a bit of a paradox at the same time.

Figurative Language
So the whole poem rests on this metaphor of time = sand, this is what the first three stanzas are about. The issue is that, this metaphor has almost been done to death. Like it's really hard to write a poem solely on the metaphor of a "broken heart" because it's been done so many times before. Used language and used metaphors are perfectly fine to use in poetry, but in order to make them catching and alive, they need to be either 1)twisted in a new or unexpected way or 2)have really fantastic imagery or narrative to back-it-up. I think that your final stanza, almost succeeds for me in twisting this common metaphor in a new way, but I wish that more of the poem was focused on that final sand-castle metaphor.

Because using memories to make sandcastles is not something I've heard before, that's unique, so my suggestion here is try to highlight that final metaphor more because that's the real meet of the poem. The rest of it, is fine technically, but has been done so many times before, that I'm afraid readers will just scan past it and miss that last gem at the bottom.

Here's what I would do:

1) condense the sand=time part
2) build up the imagery in the sand=time part to make it more compelling
3) build up the sandcastle/dream part to highlight the unique part of the piece.

Again, there's nothing technically at fault with the first half of your poem, these are just my suggestions to bring the poem to the next level.

Suggestions

form
The line breaks were very inconsistent in this piece - which although this is normally where I'd do a short rant on consistency I actually liked in this case because it made me read the poem very
slowly because the
line
breaks

were so

often.

^ You see what I did there?

So the poem's form mimicked it's content which is almost always good in poetry! Just like sand moves down, the poem was very vertical and the words kind of trickled in.

I think you could actually amplify this effect! Have tons of line breaks at the beginning and create a "pile of words" (long pushed together lines) at the end. I think if any poem should ever be centered, a poem about hour-glasses has that option too! You could really do some neat visual things with this.

I appreciated that you picked a capitalization/punctuation scheme and stuck with it! That helps me as a reader stay in the content of the piece rather than debating about commas and capital letters. Though as I said in the nitpick section, the lack of commas actually made the flow a bit difficult in a few places.

specificity
Lastly if you do expand that sand castle part, I'd love more specificity in what the dreams are and what this person is concretely struggling with. You've got a good metaphor, but I'd love to have some clues for what the concrete intended meaning was a bit more.

Praise
There's a few lines I have to highlight real quick before I go!

"someday soon it will take shape" -> I love the sound devices you used here with the repeated "s" and "a" sound. Nice!

"endless hourglass" -> that's such a neat idea of an hourglass that just goes and goes and goes. However with time, how can this be unless we live eternally? This line made me think.

Overall, it was nice to see your poetry here again! And I look forward to reading your next piece. Please let me know if you had any questions about my review and I'd be happy to comment!

exhale the poetry from your stretched lungs, but try not to lose your heart

alliyah

Fantastic! I love how you materialize and identify what seems to me to be a vision you had, something that can only be built with time. I really liked this, and hope to see more in the future! :3

Hello there @TheBlueCat I am here to do a nice review of this poem. so lets start.
okay first I can say that this sounds very true to me, for sand moves so fast and the time does to every second is like the slipping sand. it is really good how you have done this.

as if through an endless hourglass

Hi there! I really enjoyed this poem! The only thing I noticed was a small typo. .

This line: "but the still slip by so quickly"
Was that "the" supposed to be "They?"
That was all I noticed, and the ending is my favorite part!
"but i

i build sand castles

even though i can't quite get them to look

like the dreams in my head

someday soon

it will take shape

just like i always dreamed"

Amazing!