either way

by jaani

Published August 19, 2012

In poetry

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she dances like a raindrop,
collapses on the ground, 
and all of her bones shatter,
made from thin, liquid glass,
her voice ripples on the surface
and it screams
the soft syllables pirouetting on your eardrums
her fingertips tapping
can you hear them?
they are cotton balls
being dropped on the asphalt
can you hear them?
(it's the wind carrying her feet across the air)
and she dances like a raindrop.
you can catch her
and she can shatter in your palms.
Comments & reviews · 4
gabriellajames42 wrote a review Review · Aug 23, 2012

i love the flowyness of the poem, could use a
little minor punctuations
and details but great all together
love the shortness of it,
keep on writting because yoour great at it(:

jaani replied · Aug 26, 2012

thanks :)

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Dreamergirl
Review
Dreamergirl wrote a review Review · Aug 20, 2012

I like how the poem flows, though there a few minor changes that could make it something much better :)
Great effort, Keep writing ~

- Dreamergirl

jaani replied · Aug 20, 2012

thank you very much :)

User avatar
Aurrora Review
Aurrora wrote a review Review · Aug 19, 2012

Hi! Welcome to the Wonderful World of YWS!
I love the imagery here. It makes me think of girls dancing in the air in shimmery skirts. Very nice.

A few things:
*"and all of her bones shatter" is a little wordy. It interrupts the flow. Try "and her bones shatter"
*..thin, liquid glass" From the it continues, it seems like this is the end of a "thought" (I don't want to call it sentence because of your rather unique formatting), and so there should be a period at the end. It would look a lot cleaner.
*"the soft syllables pirouetting on your eardrums" I am a little bit in love with this line. It's a new idea, new imagery, from anything I've read before.
"they are cotton balls
being dropped on the asphalt" I don't think you can hear cotton balls when they're dropped on asphalt. They're kind of soft and squishy and don't make noise. Something to think about. Maybe try something that might make a noise, or at least a more interesting picture (I think this might have been what you were going for, something silent). Maybe raindrops or snowflakes. Raindrops make a wonderful noise when dropped on asphalt.
*"(it's the wind carrying her feet across the air)" This line is great :)
*"and she can shatter in your palms" This is strange. It's a really good ending, but the awkwardness of the execution is a little off-putting. I want it to be a sucker-punch ending. I want you to be able to make me cry. Maybe "and she will shatter in your hands" or "so she can shatter (in your hands (optional))". Play around with it a bit. You're so, so close to a great ending.

Overall, I love, love, loved it. It just needs a little touching up, and it will be find. I hope my feedback helped!

Love,
Rory

jaani replied · Aug 19, 2012

thank you very much for the great review and compliment. :) yes i know how to improve it and i will take the advice you have given me here and use it for my future works. thank you again.

User avatar
prolixity
Review
prolixity wrote a review Review · Aug 19, 2012

Hey, welcome to YWS. This is really good. It has some really neat things going on with the water imagery, contrasts, and the repetition at the end. And all of the sensory details make it very... tactile. Good stuff.

I found the punctuation a little weird. I don't care if people use punctuation in poems or not, but it's distracting if it's wrong or inconsistent. You might want to try writing it out as a paragraph and make sure you have complete sentences. You could also see how it looks/feels without any punctuation (except the question marks and parentheses.) It's totally up to you.

I feel like "and all of her bones shatter" is a bit wordy and gets in the way of itself. I don't like the "and" and the "all of" seems unnecessary.

I'm not sure how I feel about "thin, liquid glass"... The first time I read it I thought you should take it out because it doesn't make sense -- liquid glass doesn't shatter. But when I read it a second time it seemed to fit with these contrasts of opposites you make: liquid/glass, screams/soft syllables, cotton balls/asphalt. It's funny, I read "liquid ice" the first time... that really doesn't make sense, but I kind of like that too. In a way it makes more sense for a raindrop to be ice than glass? I don't know, just think about that.

Grammatically, I think "her fingertips tapping" should be "her fingertips tap." You don't have to change it though. I do think it would be nice to saying what they're tapping on, though.

You could take the "the" out of "being dropped on the asphalt." I think it sounds better and speaks to the reader more... it's any asphalt, not "the" asphalt that exists in your poem.

I don't like the "and" in "and she dances like a raindrop." It sounds out of place at the beginning of a sentence. Maybe you did it so it would be a little different from the first line. You could figure out a different way to change it around. As long as you have something about dancing and rain, I think we'll recognize that you're bringing us back to the beginning.

I'm wondering about your title, and thinking it complements the opposites theme. But it does seem to hint at something more, a story inside the poem that we don't get to see. Possibly. So if there is a story going on here, it would be great if you could give us a few glimpses of that.

I hope this was helpful! Keep writing!

Prolix

jaani replied · Aug 19, 2012

it was helpful, thank you very much! i wrote this poem a month or two ago, actually, so yeah i think it'd be nice to go back and see how i can improve it. :) thank you very much for your review!

I love how the poem flows, it's a cute poem. :)

I love how the poem flows, it's a cute poem. :)

jaani replied · Aug 20, 2012

thank you very much :3



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