Young Writers Society

The irony and subtle sarcasm in your poem was commendable.I really loved how you interwined the American dream and celebration of excellence with the evils plaguing the society like rascism, mass school shootings etc. I really enjoyed every stanza of the poem, and as the poem progressed it kept getting darker and darker, ending with a thundering crescendo.

Hi there! Your poem was pretty powerful and interesting to read. I'm pretty sure you're trying to bring light to current events and it's amazing that you're expressing it creatively in a way many people can enjoy. The imagery you included in the poem was pretty powerful overall. One thing is that you started new lines in a few places unnecessarily, but aside from that it was a great poem overall!
Keep up the great writing!

Ah this definitely went in a direction I wasn't expecting - there's a lot of complexity between the comparison of the fireworks to the nation's founding and you get at some of the bitter themes of revolution and violence within the independence day nationhood story.

Strangely enough when I first joined YWS I wrote a poem with very similar themes and your poem reminded me of it -> A Long Time Ago

A couple formatting things:

You had some really short/awkward line breaks, you don't want to break a line so that there isn't any important content in it - you want to break lines in more natural places where you would pause in speech - like in clauses, or phrases, unless you're purposely breaking them for effect like with enjambment.

Some examples of awkward linebreaks:
"And we/"
went mad"

"we knew
what a nightmare"

"sang out
surround us"

^ those are just not natural places to pause, I'd try reading the poem outloud and try hitting a table or take a 1 second pause at each line break and you'll see sort of how that is effecting the flow of the piece.

Another formatting thing - is when you use a formatting method for emphasis - like italics or bold or underline, it looses it's emphatic effect if overused. So I think when you have such a large section in italics it really loses it's usefullness.

Now for the content of the poem itself - it seems to be told from the perspective of someone considering the fourth of july fireworks and then reflecting on all the violence and bloodshed between not just independence day but also other violence conflicts the nation has been involved in. I think you could be a bit more specific actually on what conflicts you're trying to bring attention to; that would give a bit more weight to your piece. I did like that the light / firework / drama theme sort of carried through the rest of the poem, and then you had good continuity at the end by closing with a piece about fireworks and a broken peace. That really made the poem come full circle and gave good closure to the piece.

I think my favorite passage is this one:

We

Set fire to the sky.

We aimed for the moon

We burned out halfway up

This review courtesy of