i wonder when you held me for the first time
if you knew that you would hate everything i grew to be.
fresh out of the womb, all i knew was trust,
and it takes years to understand
that trust can be breached with a single word.
in those years, i have learned many things.
i have learned how to look for the clouds gathering in your eyes--
they say that eyes are the windows to the soul
and yours were always rain-pelted, gray-tinged
with the promises of a thunderstorm.
when you spoke, lightning lashed from your tongue
and pierced my flesh, coursed through my veins,
built a crackling fence around my heart.
i still fear the lightning, but i do not cry out
when it lights up my blood in a million different colors.
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139,807 Literary Works • 672,771 Reviews
Heya! Konijn here to review!
So first off, I love the metaphor in this poem. It's very interesting and I can't say I've read anything like it! I really enjoyed getting to interpret it myself, as it paints an interesting image that I feel can be unique to each individual reader. I did notice a few things that I personally would change. For instance, the lines:
"when you spoke, lightning lashed from your tongue
and pierced my flesh, coursed through my veins,
built an electric fence around my heart."
I feel that the word "and" is misplaced, as generally when you list objects, events, etc. you tend to put the word and at the end. If we did this in your poem it would look a bit more like this:
"when you spoke, lightning lashed from your tongue,
pierced my flesh, coursed through my veins,
and built an electric fence around my heart."
See the difference? Of course, you could also fix this minor error by splitting it up into two sentences as well, but it's all really up to you.
That's the one error I really wanted to point out. There are some places where I felt commas were overused/maybe unnecessary, but in poetry sometimes that's intentional and a matter of opinion. I really enjoyed this poem and I hope to read more from you in the future. Keep up the good work!
Hi there, erilea. It’s Clarity here to do a review for you.
I was a little turned off by the layout of this since it just goes line to line to line. But despite that, you’ve got some really great content. I really think if you split this into some stanzas you would make it flow so much better and really showcase some of the imagery you’ve got going on. Like this in particular:
I loved these lines. I almost felt my heart break – it seems like a really important part to the poem and really deserves to be in its own stanza. Maybe even split line one from the following three as I feel they are the most powerful. It was a turning point where I went from sympathising with the narrator to understanding the pain they are actually feeling.
I’ve interpreted this as a child speaking to their mother and talking them through the tale of how awful they made their childhood – how this has shaped them into a person who has learned to close out harsh words and almost turn off their emotions.
I really like these three lines:
But the line that come after kind of stunts the rhythm you had going. I think it’s the “million different colors” – it just didn’t flow right for me.
I have a few suggestions on your punctuation as there’s a few bits here and there that seem oddly placed, and I have some suggestions on the structure of the poem – but I don’t want to stack the review full of it. If you’re interested though, please PM me and I’ll go through them with you.
Overall, you did a really good job on this poem. Just the odd few bits that could do with tweaking but I am very impressed with it so far. Well done!
Keep on writing,
~Clary
Thanks for the review, Clarity!
My pleasure