i.
if sand is ice then you are an ocean
and i never knew the first thing about water. and sand is always getting mixed up in metaphors about time slipping away, but i think it's more accurate to say we slipped away this time because it wasn't time’s fault that i thought you were someone else.
i would not even blame fate, or the stars, or the thin distance between breaths and waves of reason. we were never a chance, but a choice made on a whim of drawing lines between words and my cautious feelings like marked out constellations and hoping
that it meant something to you.
honestly,
i think we just pretended
I.
Tell me something I don’t know. Like why you never spoke, except in complicated metaphors pretending to be truth, or why you fell in love with someone else convinced they were me.
I have never waited for the sun to rise with anyone,
but for you I’d juggle the stars and carry the sun on my shoulders
just to see you smile.
and for some reason, I don’t think you ever believed me. or believed in me. or us.
or believed in yourself.
ii.
we were sailboats going out to sea for ice-fishing. i keep asking myself who we were trying to fool. if i close my eyes i can still trace the scars from dragging our feet over crumbling rocks instead of waves and make-believing we were dancing over warm beaches.
maybe that’s why i always thought you were different because you didn’t seem to care about what was sand or ice and rejected every way i tried to put you in a box or name you and everything was relative and
i thought i could be your truth.
II.
I used to believe in love like rain. A force of nature, unavoidable, unstoppable.
But I actually got tired of pretending I could breathe underwater,
so now I just believe in people. and people I happen to love, but not because love happens, but because their whispers and laughter and conversations over morning coffee expand in my lungs, and I choose to hold on, sometimes crushing my own fingers when I hang on too tight. As long as I can hold my breath. I don’t believe love chooses us, but we choose to love,
if we’re strong enough.
iii.
the one thing i will never forget is how you re-wrote rules so easily for your own reference,
your books were folded corners and scribbles in the margins of every page; annotations which became my sacred text on how i too could see the world
but i blame myself for putting so much faith in someone
not attached to the ground.
III.
I don't believe in regret. Drowning twice rarely solves the problem.
But I turn around our last conversation, like waves catching the shore, and repeat. and repeat. When you said, in your quiet contradictory way, that I was right, that we were wrong for each other,
but that you still loved me.
I should have told you then that this time it wasn’t about love,
but time and passing ships, and hands grown too weak to carry two.
Because even now,
I still love you, with every breath, and even when I lose my breath.
And that is why I let go.
iv.
and i guess if sand is ice and you are an ocean
then i’m just a sentimental spirit who always seems to fall in love
with temporary permanence and the people who promise they are different.
and it’s odd to say,
that although you mean the ocean and all the stray meteors in the sky to me it’s all sort of relative now, because whether you’re winter ice or summer sand between my toes
you were never here to stay
IV.
If you breathe too close to ice it melts. If you breathe too close to sand you choke on the dust.
So I hold my breath, and count my heart beats, and pray.
one, two, three, four, five.
one day you too will see your worth and there will be no doubt
for the moon cannot help but see her worth when even the stars in the dark reflect her fire.
one, two, three, four, but I can’t make you love yourself,
no matter how much you are loved by me.
v.
and there’s no stopping the ocean.
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140,085 Literary Works • 672,996 Reviews
Hiya, alliyah! A million apologies that it's taken me so long, but I'm finally here to complete the third review I owed you. Better late than never, I guess?
So, my first impressions of this piece. The meaning came through pretty clearly on the whole - to me, it seemed to be about a troubled past relationship, driven apart by one party's self-loathing and a mismatch in how much they cared for each other. As I've mentioned in another review, romantic poetry isn't typically to my taste, but there are snatches of this piece that I really love. Your imagery is strong and there's a nice rhythm to your sentences, which makes it almost musical to read. Sometimes, however, I feel like you get lost in that musicality and lose your grip on meaning - there are a handful of metaphors which, while poetic sounding, don't really feel like they mean anything. I do wonder if the piece is a bit overlong, as well, because I feel like some of your later stanzas are just reinforcing things that have already been said.
Let's get more specific, then. I'm just going to work through the poem chronologically and draw attention to the things that took my notice.
Honestly, this is one of the metaphors that I didn't really get. It might just be me, but I've been contorting the sentence in my head for the last few minutes and I still can't figure out what it's supposed to mean. I don't really get what sand is supposed to represent, nor why it would be likened to ice, nor why in turn that means the addressee is an ocean. It wrong-foots me.
I have a similar sort of problem here. It sounds beautiful in my head, but I don't really get what it means or what it represents. It sort of feels like poetic language for the sake of it.
I absolutely love those first two lines, particularly the image of juggling the stars. I actually think you could scrap the 'just to see you smile' line. Given that you have 'for you' in the second line, I don't think it adds much. Up to you, though.
I think this image would be much stronger without the intrusion of the bold. I like the contrast between crumbling rocks and warm beaches and think you should draw more attention to it - throwing mention of waves into the mix just muddles the image.
This is another part which feels quite untethered and vague. You've not really referenced truth much throughout the poem, so I have a hard time pinning down exactly what being 'your truth' entails. I almost feel like 'your constant' would fit better, given that the focus seems to be on the lover's changeable, unpinned nature.
I feel like this line is almost there. I love the sentiment of it, but I feel like you should extend the metaphor all the way through the phrase. Reading it, I wondered if something like 'drowning twice makes it no easier to breathe' might work better. 'Solves the problem' seems a bit too unspecific.
This is a great metaphor. It lends a lot more clarity to the whole sand and ice juxtaposition that keeps cropping up throughout.
I'm not sold on this as a last line, at least not in its current position. It doesn't feel like the previous stanza leads into it all that well, which gives it a tacked-on vibe.
So, specifics aside, I feel like the main flaw with this piece is the lack of selectivity and clarity in a lot of the metaphors. There's plenty of lovely, musical imagery, but it feels like it's muddied together in places, and like you've picked it because of how it sounds rather than because it really communicates a point. Being more sharply focused on the meaning you want to create would hopefully let you better fine-tune the description you use to explore it. Don't feel like you have to dress every single line up in finery - a simple image often gets you exactly where you need to be.
I hope this review helped! I always feel so shaky when it comes to critiquing poetry because the rules of it are so tenuous. If there's anything I didn't comment on that you'd like me to discuss, please do ask.
Keep writing!
~Pan
Thanks so much for this review Pan (& for the other reviews at all) you've made some really good points & have given me some good pointers on where to rework some of the lines. Thank you again!
Right, so I have absolutely no idea how to review this but I guess I will be because that's what you posted in the thread.
So this is beautiful. I really enjoyed it on a first read, and I'm finding so much more I could say on a second read. Your imagery is powerful and generally cohesive despite having a lot of metaphors in there. And the story is beautiful.
My Interpretation:
To me, there are two speakers, the red one and the green one. The red one is afraid, has low self-esteem, and is not confident to the point that she seems self-sabotaging. (This is reflected in her lack of capitalization and I really like that stylistically.) She's... pessimistic, I guess, wondering who their love is fooling and constantly second-guessing herself. The green person, on the contrary, is confident and comfortable with himself. (Sorry, assuming his gender here.) He is willing to take things how they are, to be comfortable without putting things into boxes, to just live. And because she is unable to do that, their relationship is not working. And it's tragic and horribly sad and beautiful, especially because now she thinks he's the kind of person who falls in love with a "temporary permanence", and blames herself for being just a "sentimental girl." :'(
Critique
Green stanza III felt slightly strange to me. It's a really important stanza because it's where we start to get to the heart of why they broke up, but it follows the format of "what I should have said in our last conversation" which is overdone in romantic poetry and while you do it well, it doesn't quite feel like it fits, especially since their isn't a part where the red girl thinks about what she should have said. I'm not sure what you could do to smooth it out - I don't think you should completely re-work the stanza. Maybe just de-emphasize the "I'd take back one thing" and the mention that it was their last conversation.
I also think there are a couple places where the line seems to exist more for the sake of the gorgeous imagery/a pretty-sounding line than for the actual meaning behind it. For example:
I just didn't like these lines much - they felt like they "fit" too well together without having a strong, clear connection to the rest of the piece - like lines from a different poem, almost.
(I really love the second half of that stanza. Possible my favorite lines in the whole piece.)
This is one where the imagery is nice, but it expresses a vague sentiment and doesn't make a lot of strictly logical sense, as stars don't reflect the light of the moon. If instead of reflect, you said "imitate" or something like that, it would make more logical sense, though the sentiment would still be vague.
I really think that's all I have to say. Generally, you could probably just tighten up some metaphors here and there, but I can't think of anything specific other than what I've said already. This is a really lovely poem, and I hope my review could be at least a little bit helpful. But this piece is something to be proud of. <3
Ah thanks so much Mea! This is really helpful, and I'm glad that the story came through.
I was worried this poem felt a bit too ooey-gooey/cliche in a few places, and stanza 3 I think is where that really comes out. I'll see what I can do to re-work it a bit.
Good feedback on those lines where the metaphors got a bit muddled. In the last line you mention I was trying to do something clever with repeating the numbers within the line at first (ie. using the words one, to/two, there/three, for/four, fire/five) but it ended up seeming a bit gimmicky in the execution so I took the formatting away there.
Thanks again for all of your comments and helpful suggestions!
As a whole, I really love this. You can feel the fragility of these lines yet they're incredibly bold. The turbulence is always present, masked by the calming imagery and smooth flow of words; I think this contradiction is what brings this poem to life.
It's not perfect, for sure. But I believe these slight flaws were essential to preserve the poem's authenticity and connection to the reader. To keep it simple, imperfection kept it real.
In particular, this stanza stood out to me..
"I used to believe in love like rain.
But I actually got tired of pretending I could breathe underwater,
so now I just believe in people. and people I happen to love, but not because love happens, but because their whispers and laughter and conversations over morning coffee expand in my lungs, and I choose to hold on, sometimes crushing my own fingers when I hang on too tight. As long as I can hold my breath. I don’t believe love chooses us, but we choose to love,
if we’re strong enough."
It holds a deeper meaning than presented. it's beautiful.
I love the metaphors and imagery, the order of stanzas, but most of all its vulnerability.
You did a great job
Thank you for the lovely review!
I appreciate it!
I don't get this at all but I love it anyways!
Thanks, I think!
Hey Alli! Here I am to review your poem!
I love the way you formatted this but I found some wording confusing so I thought I'd drop in and do a quick review.
I find this really confusing. I'm not quite sure how to read this sentence or what it means. Maybe some commas or rewording or something.
Beautiful.
Am I missing the meaning behind this or something? It just doesn't really make sense to me like sailboats don't float on snow. I feel like I'm missing something.
I have always admired your imagery. Like wow.
I think this is my favorite stanza. Though I still don't understand the last sentence.
The rest of this poem is beautiful and feels like you're stabbing my heart. Thank you <3
Thanks so much for your feedback marms, it is very appreciated! I made some serious edits to the piece - to tone down some of the nonsensical parts a bit.. and add a whole new speaker too. I'm super proud of that first line and the rest of the piece draws on that complicated metaphor that makes sense in my head, but I'm not sure how well it gets to the audience - might need to work on it a bit more. I also clarified the sailboat stanza that you pointed out - because it's purposely supposed to be paradoxical (as you don't need boats to go ice-fishing) but I agree the "snow" in there made it way too confusing to interpret. Hope you like the additions!
And thanks again!
Radrook here for a review. Please feel free to ignore any advice you deem unhelpful.
Thanks for sharing this poem concerning a girl who is disappointed in how a relationship turned out. I like how the poem uses sand, and the ocean as metaphor. It separates it from prose in a very effective way. It also engages the visual faculties which is very pleasant. But most of all, I like the way that the girl calmly accepts the whole supposed disaster and methodically proceeds to analyze the details in an emotionally detached way.
If indeed her former boyfriend would be listening to her as she announces these things or reads them, he might just reach the conclusion that the girl was being insincere all along as well. This is something that the poem strongly insinuates.
Although the girl is disappointed, to me she comes across as calm and accepting the whole thing in a philosophical way. She doesn’t wish him evil, neither is she berating him. More like observing and learning from a curious experience. Even when she says that she often falls in love, it isn’t in an outraged tone. More like a tone of resignation to what she has concluded was inevitable. The ocean must move on so naturally he being similar had to move on. My favorite phrase is "temporary permanence”. Rather funny in a way how calm she seems.
Suggestions
....meteors in the sky to me[,]....
....between my toes[,]....
....i think we just pretended[.]
[sailboats]
https://www.sailboatlistings.com
....and make-believing.... [....and making belief....]
Looking forward to reading more of your work.
Thanks for your feedback on Radrook! I enjoyed reading your interpretation. The placement of commas was tricky in this piece, with all the purposeful run-on sentences, but I added a few at your suggestion for a bit more clarity. Thanks again!