I closed my eyes,
and i tried to say it.
My heart ached,
and i was afraid.
I was afraid to say;
"I love you."
Voices of hate blared throughout my mind.
They were loud,
loud enough so my words were drowned out.
It's 1950;
black and white.
Discrimination at every turning point,
Everyone's afraid of different,
afraid of change,
everyone but me.
Tears scavenge their way to my lap.
It hurts.
It's hurts the cruel things spat at me.
I'm still afraid;
to say "i love you.
Finally,
the marching begins.
We hold signs,
hope for peace.
Now,
i can finally say it.
We are free at once.
I whisper in your ear;
"I love you"
You whisper back;
we aren't afraid...
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Canary word: Present
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125,027 Literary Works • 672,772 Reviews
Hey, yo, Perfectionwriter! Strange here on this fantastic Review Day and I have a review for you! Well, you didn't live up to your name. I felt that this poem was nice and sweet, but it just stops in its tracks at one point. I did understand the message, but I felt that you didn't deliver it that good. Let me get onto the good stuff first.
I did like how this poem was short and sweet. It did make me have a smile on my face, the whole idea of this poem. I felt that it was soft. It was not blunt (Well, at one point, but I'll get to that), and you carried it like a baby the whole way through. That's what some poems need. They need softness and subtly. You sure had that.
When was it blunt? When you straight out said it was 1950s. It makes it seem like the poem is attempting to get to the "Aww, up to make a difference", but it stops in its tracks. The delivery there wasn't good. You just blankly said it, really. The narrator wants to make importance. You could just make her pick up a newspaper, and it'll say the date. That would of been better. The topic, is, nice. That's all I can really say. This poem, while having some faults, was nice and sweet. It was good, and doesn't go down on the bad scale.
Overall, good job.
Strange gives you...
7.6/10
Good job,
Keep writing,
Stay groovy, my friend.
#TheFaultInOurReviews
Hello.
This is a nice sentiment but I find it a little simplistic for what happened in the 50s and 60s.
For example, homosexuality wasn't simply a social taboo; it was a mental illness. There was much more than simple fear behind the scenes and people would be forced into hormone therapy to try and "cure" them. Homosexuals in Germany would've still been fresh out of the Holocaust (they weren't freed with the Jews) and in general life was pretty terrible for them. There wasn't simply fear, but instead the risk of being branded a sex offender and charged without trial. Some people who were charged in the 50s/60s still haven't been pardoned and have "sex offender" on their criminal records (that, or the pardons came within the past twenty years).
As for the poem itself, there's nothing really to ground me in it. You have a narrator, but no real concrete moments or characters outside of that to build a scene or a moment. You're traveling from the 50s to Stonewall, which was in the late 60s, and such a big time period with nothing solid leaves me unable to connect.
Your ending is also very sugary sweet, which, to me, feels like it ignores the history after homosexuality got decriminalized: namely, the AIDS outbreak. Things weren't all happiness and so many gay rights activists died because nobody wanted to treat "the gay illness", and it literally took nurses, pretty much all women, stealing supplies and setting up makeshift clinics to get anybody even a simple pain killer. People thought, and still think, AIDS is God's punishment on gays for being immoral.
In short, this poem was ungrounded in any one event and lacks a lot of history's darker secrets the LGBTQA community felt at the time, and still feels today.
Hope this helps. PM me if you have any questions/comments.
~Rosey
This is something that I can really relate to, if only because of my own sexuality. Even today it is not so clear cut and dry. Acceptance is a constant battle, because as you put it, people are afraid of "different". Now, I think that the capitalization of the "i" throughout, feels intentional. At least to me it feels like at the beginning of the poem the reason it is not capital is because it reflects the fear and hesitation from the narrator. They are unsure and afraid to say the words "i love you." It is like a whisper in their own mind. Then as it progresses, the confidence builds and builds until you can say "I love you." But...the "we" is still lower case, because "we" is not accepted in the world around them. It is accepted in their hearts but not anywhere else.
Really well done.
Hi there!
Now, since we're living in 2014, we can imagine why this person was afraid. However, I want to see what's going on in the poem. I imagine it's a protest. An old school one, yes? So we've got all these LGBT activists over here, and we've got a bunch of people protesting their protest over there. What will happen if the protest gets too heated? Don't leave out possibilities. Show the reader why the narrator is afraid. Instead of saying "I was afraid," show us why. Perhaps the sweat from the brows of the men coursed in rivulets down their angry wrinkles, or they're pushing at the officers, shouting threats of harm, shaking fists. Show the fear. This happens at several other places in the poem, and I encourage you to look at these places and show us a little more of what's going on.So I appreciate the message of this poem, but I think it needs a little work on execution.
The main issues I had in this piece were these: tells rather than shows, details, time weirdness, and redundancy.
Showing, not telling.
So poetry is about showing and not telling, but you tell quite a lot in this piece. Show the reader what's happening, don't tell the reader what's happening. Let's look at this part:
Details.
Leaving the narrator space open to let the readers fill themselves into that slot should only belong in songs written by boy bands. Here, you've left it far too open to interpretation. What gender is the narrator? Honestly, if I hadn't read the description, I might have thought that this was about race equality and being able to be in an interracial relationship. As I am in an interracial relationship, I found it quite interesting in that way. However, since you did not intend the subject to be about that, you need to add more detail to make sure that your ideas are conveyed properly. Also, I might research when LGBT protesters really started protesting. I don't know if they really had any in 1950. Delve into it. If nothing else, it's good to know about this kind of thing.
Time weirdness.
So does the narrator and her/his/xer love jump into the future here? The protest certainly couldn't have changed things suddenly. That's not how it works. So I am forced to conclude that a time jump occurred, and we're now in present day at the end of the poem. However, you barely transitioned into the time jump at all, and I was left quite confused. Since you used a television metaphor previously, perhaps you can say that the color is turned back on, also drawing attention to the LGBT rainbow symbol. I think it would be a great addition.
Redundancy.
Make sure you're not repeating yourself in the lines after you have already said it. Once is enough. Here are some places where redundancy was a bit of an issue.
Nitpicks.
You have a few typos that you can fix yourself if you go through it carefully.
I don't usually comment on capitalization in poetry because it's the poet's choice, but since the capitalization of your i's wasn't consistent, I wanted to point it out to you. The inconsistency was distracting, and I suggest that you either capitalize all of them or none of them.
What are the tears scavenging? If you're scavenging something, you're looking for it. You could say scavenging a way, but as it is, it doesn't make sense.
I felt that this line seemed kind of petulant. As readers, we understand that generalizations are just generalizations. Most people were afraid of change, but when the narrator says "everyone but me," it takes it out of generalizations and takes it into horribly sweeping generalizations. Take this line out and the poem will be happier with you.
Don't end poems with ellipses. It makes the poem feel unfinished and really it doesn't serve any purpose. A solid period will do.
I hope that you found this review helpful to you! Have a nice day, and keep writing!