My Vacation

I love this! I love how you switch from all the end words rhyming to every other word rhyming. I don't know anything about poetry so I don't know what that is called, if anything. But I will say it is easy to understand and read. It also makes sense without knowing a back story. I always find this a good quality to have in any writing because trying to tell the story behind a story (that's weird to say) could take a long time and be boring, depending on the story. If it was boring, you would lose readers before they got to the actual thing you wanted them to read. So the fact that your poem is easy to understand without a back story is awesome! I didn't notice any spelling or grammar errors. Like I said, I don't know anything about poetry so I don't have anything to say about the format. It was short and sweet and to the point and kept my attention through the whole thing. I never lost interest or got confused. If I could change one thing though, it would be in the second paragraph third line, that doesn't rhyme with anything from the poem so it kind of throws it off and doesn't sound right. Other than that, I love it!

Hey Chance!~

Aley here to review. First thing first, if you're wondering how to format your poetry on YWS to get all the lines all nice and pretty, here's a link to a great tutorial How to Format Your Poetry on YWS.

On to the nitty gritty. >3
First I'd like to say that I think you have a good start to a narrative poem in this piece. The open ended feeling and easy to follow plot that make it sound so simple are a great start.

That being said, if you're going for narrative poetry, you should work on the plot a bit more to make it concise. The person is on vacation, they wake up, pray, and go to a flower shop where they...? I can't really say I'm sure about what is going on in this. Having them on a vacation is helpful information, but not telling us where they are, or why they think it's "Our" flower shop makes it sort of difficult to understand. Also if they're already searching for interesting trends on their vacation, why do you need to say that they they spend the early part of their day praying? Are the two things really related?

I suppose what you have to ask yourself is does this poem have a reason for talking about their day? Is there some important concept, or thing they noticed about life that happened because they were on this vacation? Poems need to be about more than just waking up and going through day to day routines. They need to be about either the sounds you can put together, the thoughts you can provoke because of the routines, or, the narrative you can offer. In that narrative, you have to provide a plot just like in a story. To me this poem is lacking the connectivity of a plot. While you don't have to say they walked from the store to the flower shop, you do have to explain how they own the flower shop if they're out on vacation, or why they pray after they're on vacation. Try to make sure things stay relatively chronological unless you're playing directly with chronological order in the poem.

On to the nit-picks about the poem itself. First off, there are a multitude of different methods to go about capitalization in poetry, so I'd suggest you try them all out. Also there are some great punctuation guides to help with that in the Knowledge Base.

I disliked your last stanza because it didn't really make any sense with the words you picked. "To our floral shop we go/where everyone has task[tasks?] to do and [what] are rarely doing their ego[egos are a noun, not a verb. They can't be doing it like they do crunches]/but [who] always have a time for you[who are you?]." To explain in more detail, I don't have any issues with the first sentence. You're missing a word or a letter near "task" which makes it sound super awkward. The third line, you just need to rework it if you want to use ego to rhyme with go, which personally I think is pretty poor and you should pick something else if you want to maintain the rhyme scheme. The third line doesn't really make logical sense, and it doesn't have a complete thought. I have proof you can do better, and that proof is the other two stanzas. If you need help editing the stanza, I'd suggest rewriting the stanza so that it flows more naturally. In the fourth line, having "a time" is awkward especially when you feel like you're missing a word after "But" like this should have been "But I will always have time for you" and instead it fell sideways.
Overall the stanza is really disconnected and it's hard to follow because of that. We're dealing with too many moving pieces and they aren't jelling together like they should, so the stanza probably needs a rewrite.

The rest of the poem is pretty good. You could use some rhyme help.

Right now your rhyme scheme is aaaa, bbcb, dede. Really you should attempt to maintain a single scheme like aaaa, bbbb, cccc, or abab, cdcd, efef, or aaba, bbcb, ccdc, or even abba, cddc, effe. Having a rhyme scheme that changes every stanza makes it hard to follow.

I'd suggest you work on the narrative part of the poem before you get into writing with rhyme schemes. Keeping one focus at a time and perfecting it is going to be quicker than working on twenty things in a poem at once. In any craft, getting overwhelmed because you bite off more than a small portion at a time is a bad idea. You can easily become blinded by the big picture and incapable of improving anything because of lack of focus.

If you have any questions, any concerns, or just want to talk about an amazing poem you found somewhere, feel free to send me a message.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Aley