Young Writers Society

Hello evamxck! Welcome to YWS! Kara here for a (hopefully) quick review!

Give me your soul.

With that aside, I'm not the best at poetry but here we go!

Bold = grammar and flow issues.
Italics = suggestions and overall
Strikethrough = remove
Underline = krazy Kara komments.

My interpretation:

Overall:

This review courtesy of

Addendum:
After I wrote all of that's below I suddenly realized that the poem is about the persecution against older students at school. So I guess I wasted my time. That teaches me to look at the title before plunging in blindly like that. Sorry!


Thanks for sharing this very intriguing poem which depicts a scene of harassment of the elderly by those who are younger. I like the way it begins with action bringing the reader immediately into the scene. It definitely is very dramatic since it introduces strong conflict at the outset. The conflict of the young verses the old. The citizen vs the government. The weak vs the strong. Mother nature and its aging process vs mankind. It also emotionally involves the reader via inciting a sense of injustice leading to righteous indignation. No one likes bullies and wishes them gone. Those are indeed the poem’s strong points along with its ability to cause the reader to ponder its meaning.

Personal observations:

Prejudice is indeed a bitch. In this case it seems to be age-related. As strange as it might sound-yes, the aged are discriminated against. For example, employers might not want to risk hiring a person whom he considers as having one foot in the grave. It could represent a loss of time and money invested in training. Or else the very appearance of the extremely aged causes the younger folks anxiety they would rather keep them at a psychological distance. Or else they are assumed to be senile and absent minded and so they might treated accordingly. But your composition describes a reaction that seems quite different from these.

Further Analyzes:

The poem describes people entering [scattering] into a location[desolate shell] and causing panic. This entrance causes panic among the aged. The question is why are the aged reacting in that way. Perhaps it is a pogrom leveled against the old such as was the case with the Jews in Nazi Germany? We aren’t told so we are left to conjecture based n the brief info we are given. Why are the ones entering describing themselves as being lonely bodies? That’s another enigma.

Suggestions:

It is very hard to imagine the aged darting and ricocheting off walls as a consequence of that frenzied physical activity. Joints gradually wear out, tendons become less pliant and prone to tear, flexibility is drastically reduced, arthritis kicks in, agility is seriously diminished and moving around doesn’t come as easily as before. In fact, many elderly just shuffle with the help of a cane. So a different type of fearful reaction would be better since it would not engender incredulity.

The verb “scattered” didn’t convey an entering into a location called a shell. Instead it seemed as if their bodies were being dispersed forcible by some violent external forces such as a bomb.

ricocheted [ricoched is not a word.

“....citizens’ faces....” [Possessive because the faces belong to the citizens.]