Young Writers Society

This poem is gorgeous, love the imagery throughout and how the images are laced with these emotional punches all the way through. Always a fan of your poetry erilea, and this is no exception.

Also this:

i will say to you the words that you deserve:
i love you.
i hate you.
it is mid-autumn, and still, i have not yet learned you
the way i wish i could.

The narrator wants true, honest love, which means telling their partner when they are in the wrong and sometimes feeling hatred for them. But everything is hidden under smiles and laughs. Everything looks and feels like a dream, but is a dream enough? Were the sun and moon meant to be apart, always and forever? Loves only meet during mid-autumn? Always, always in the middle. Never quite continues on. I wish you a hopeful day/night.

Hey there! Plume here, with a review!

I enjoyed this poem a lot. Like other commenters have said, it feels very genuine, and you capture the complex relationship between the speaker and the one they're speaking to very nicely. Each line feels very carefully thought-out to me. To me, this poem seems to be about two people who are maybe opposites but meet in the middle somewhere sometimes— it feels like something that's almost on-again, off-again. There were so many words relating to medium/middle things as well, which was a neat thing to weave throughout. Overall, it felt very contrary and conflicted, but with a certain dedication to it that made it seem like the speaker acknowledges those complex feelings and isn't necessarily content with them, but lets them exist.

One thing I liked a lot about this poem was the repeating motifs throughout. That whole repeating image of the moon appearing closest to the sun was delightful—as someone who really loves patterns in poetry, I liked the fact that you chose to start each stanza with a variation of the phrase. The use of opposites overall throughout was delightful as well, especially with times of the year/day—I loved each and every mention of the moon & sun, sunrise & dusk, spring & autumn, etc. It made it feel quite crisp which was almost juxtaposed with the colloquial and questioning nature of the speaker, which I enjoyed a lot.

Specifics

haven’t you ever flirted with the idea
of leaning over the fence, sticking your neck
out of the window? it takes a great deal of bravery
to succumb to gravity,
to fall as leaves do, with no promises of being heard,
just a last gasp beneath the clumsy footfalls
of a being larger than it could ever
understand.

but the chill will still seep into your marrow.

I won't lie, originally when I clicked onto this poem I was feeling lazy and was a bit put off by how long it was. I expected it to be a slow read, but oh my goodness was I wrong!

I was totally gripped by the voice of the narrator and the genuineness of the theme. You've perfectly put into words a feeling I've had such a hard time deciphering in my own life, and honestly I'm just staring at the screen in amazement right now. It's a very specific feeling, to have known someone for ages like the back of your hand and loving them to the moon and back - but then on the flip side sometimes it feels like you've got everything about them wrong and you hate their guts. You capture the complexity of that so eloquently!

Sometimes when poems are addressed to the reader/to a "you", it can come across as a bit contrived or like it's not actually a genuine message to that person, since it's been filtered for the sake of the reader. But this does not feel like that at all. Lines like

tell me all about the cosmic forces pulling us together–come on,
indulge me.

i have never made you cry, at least i think,

A really lovely and haunting poem. My favourite lines were:

words don’t die, they simply sink back into your chest
until they can erupt again at the first bell tones of spring–