Hiya rida!
This was an interesting and melancholy poem to read. The speaker’s voice seems very mature, like it’s a much older person looking back on a friendship they left too quickly when they were young. The tone is sort of reluctantly acknowledging, as by the end of the poem, it seems the speaker doesn’t really want to go back and fix things after all and seems too exhausted to deal with their lost friend.
The form
I like the idea of using a weekly blog worksheet as the base of the poem. The cursive font is a little hard for me to read at points, I’ll admit – so I’m not sure if the word before “steel-heart” is a person’s name or something else. Either way I thought the ‘personal details’ section as a whole was an interesting technique to use, and I get the sense that what is said that contrasts what is said in the stanzas below it. For instance it says “our-war”, but in the part below the speaker seems to doubt that their relationship with this person was “as grey” as they thought.
Overall, I was drawn to some of these details, as they gave me a sense of ominousness and grimness that contrasts starkly with the bright orange font of that “Weekly Blog Writing Prompt” text.
Language and imagery
The first stanza brought to mind the image of two children playing by the streetside at night. I like that you focused on a small detail, just on the two pebbles and how they moved, as the pebbles themselves seem to convey the instability of the friendship that was still ‘new’ at the time, I think.
With the second stanza, the image of “plants” surprised me a little – it seems to juxtapose the inanimate pebbles and suggest that their friendship wasn’t able to grow healthily in the way plants do.
The last line felt a bit unclear to me in comparison. The image “conversation-schedules” seems to be more in line with the motif of schoolwork, but that hadn’t really been mentioned in the text of the poem itself (only in the formatting) so I think it threw me for a bit of a loop. Maybe if there had been more references to the idea that the friends met at a set time every day, or had a very mechanical scheduling process to their meetings earlier on, the last bit might have been easier to link to the rest of the poem.
Structure and Sound
I love how the lines “I suppose . . . hopeful flight” sound read aloud, especially with all the internal rhymes and repeated sounds. The way the second line gets longer with more pauses too made me feel the speaker’s regret.
The repetition of “I suppose” to structure the first and second stanzas also gave me the sense that the speaker’s point of view was a doubtful, uncertain one, which makes sense given that their memory seems to be unreliable.
“conversation-schedules” was a bit of a mouthful, though it is an interesting word to use. I think that was the only part here where I got stuck, though.
I liked the rhythm of the overall poem. Some parts felt very symmetrical, which gave it a song-like quality, for example “memory is fuzzy, and it helps to forget-“ has a pause in the middle, and so does “but really – I’ve stopped caring” in the second stanza.
That’s all
Hopefully you found some of these comments helpful, and feel free to ask me about anything I said in this review.
Keep writing!
-Lim
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