Stargazing
at 3 in the morning.
The moonlight radiates
throughout my chest
in ripples of liquid tranquility.
My slim face angles up toward the heavens
as amber eyes focus on the round entity.
Its craters reflect to line up
with every scar on my face.
Beneath the dot to dot negative,
molten thoughts flow down my lips
and land in the cushioned blanket's silence.
I wonder,
if when God spoke,
and with each line of prose
that unraveled from his mind
unto the blank canvas
the watercolor galaxies fell into place
on the midnight satin poem he spoke.
I wonder
if when we look into the infinite skies,
when we really see the individual
dabs of light and color,
when we feel the stars’ fire in our breath,
are we living within the lines of God?
Do we see the calligraphy of God?
Maybe we can only see the art
when we cease to fear the dark.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
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125,030 Literary Works • 672,904 Reviews
Heya, TheColoroftheSky! Your best reviewer here to review! You know you love my reviews! Anyway, you know the deal. It starts with the good and ends with the bad. So, I guess it'll be that way this time! Hehehehehehe! Plus I've had coffee! So, I'm gonna finish what I started!
Anyway, the good!
The imagery is really good(but that's to be expected am I right?) It's really good, and the wording is well placed. AS USUAL!
The way you word thing is just breathtaking. You take the reader into another world, make them envision what you want them to see, make them see things in their mind that is just completely wonderful! Props to you man! Amazing!
Anyway- to the bad, the nitpicks, the errors, the flaws, or whatever you want to call them.
AS AGAIN- the capitalization. YOU DON'T HAVE IT. You neeeeed to work on this man. Try, try, and try again. You'll eventually get it.
"Repetition impresses facts upon dull minds."
I love that saying, if you can't tell. My Algebra teacher was right- that's how you do it. It's how it should be.
Anyway- to the next!
"The moonlight radiates
throughout my chest
in ripples of liquid tranquility.
My slim face angles up toward the heavens
as amber eyes focus on the round entity.
Its craters reflect to line up
with every scar on my face."
This flow seems okay- it goes well.
"Beneath the dot to dot negative,
molten thoughts flow down my lips
and land in the cushioned blanket's silence.
I wonder,
if when God spoke,
and with each line of prose
that unraveled from his mind
unto the blank canvas
the watercolor galaxies fell into place
on the midnight satin poem he spoke."
But here it's longer- choppier.
Really you're only three problems are- punctuation, capitalization, and flow. Otherwise you're spot on when it comes to poetry and I'm shaking at it! Amazing!
Keep on doing what you're doing and keep on keeping on man.
Your friend- Matthew Casanova Aaron.
Dear, Thecolorofthesky
I have to say, I don't like this poem. I just feel it's something that is so drenched in this typical "I'M A POET!" form. I feel the line that exemplifies this attribute the most is "on the midnight satin poem he spoke." While that sounds cool. What does it mean? Is the midnight a poem? How is the poem satin? Or is the night satin? Meaning that it's comforting? If that is the case, then the line becomes less confusing and more just a poor choice of description.
When it comes to poetry, I feel the truly effective ones are not when they say stuff like "Minerva, anguished goddess of tormented years!" but instead are the poems that set up a scene and bring it to life through unique details. For example instead of simply telling us that the midnight was comforting (again, I'm assuming that's what the line was going for.) tell us how it was comforting.
Tell us the smells you sensed, the feel of small ants crawling between the canvases of your spread palm, of how that made you feel knowing there was something alive interacting with you, maybe a stray light from some car zooms past your vision making you slightly uncomfortable knowing someone is near by. Any detail that you noticed and feel the need to explain due to your unique perspective of the million of things happening around you at every given moment makes a great poem great.
Honestly, while I've only been talking about one line, that's essentially the same type of question I could ask about any other line too. Such as "Molten thoughts flow down my lips." I can assume that you were saying hateful or painful things, but what we're those painful things? Perhaps if we knew what they were, we could then have a deeper understanding of what lead you to start thinking about God and questioning if mankind is living within God's lines.
You've set up a scene with this poem and instead of explaining it and giving us a picture. You gave us these "poetic" descriptions that fail to give a powerful view into this persons mind.
Now I do want to congratulate you on getting front page. That's awesome, good for you. I mean that. These are just my opinions and hopefully you don't take them too personal and simply view them as simple critiques and possibly constructive ones as well. Keep writing.
MrTalljoker, poetry
Forever.
Hi there! Thank you for the comment! I can completely understand if you don't enjoy it. My belief is that art is subjective, but successful art makes someone feel, think or remember. This piece was not successful in your eyes. I'll keep the critiques in mind as I continue to edit. This particular poem was me letting go of some stuff. I won't tell the long story, but my poetry usually is a tool for me in handling life. I appreciate your time! Stay rad.
-thecolorofthesky
Okay! I officially love this poem, it's cute, it has a nice consistent rhyme and rhythm which I love, the message is clear, it tells a story, and it's descriptive. It's adorable. I have no stylistic or thematic critiques because, well, there are none. It's great! So I am forced to revert to my grammar-nazi nit-picking state. Here we go. Your only two issues are that occasionally, near the beginning of the poem, you revert to the present tense. The rest of the poem is in the past, but near the beginning it looks like you're having a hard time deciding past or present.
Wow, this is so beautiful!
This struck a chord within me. I love nighttime, I'm a night owl and I never go to sleep until at least midnight if not later (even though I should probably sleep more because I am a grumpy cat). This is a beautiful articulation of abstract thought. I'm no poet and so I've never been able to write anything like this, but this lines up directly with my own thoughts. I love it, I want to read it over and over again until I memorize it. I want to get it tattooed on my chest. (okay maybe not tattooed on my chest because that's a bit extreme but you know what I mean.)
Literally I have no thematic critiques. I tried to think of some but I couldn't. As a result I have been forced to revert back to my grammar-nazi nit-pick mode in order to offer you any useful advice. This is my first critique:
"It’s craters reflect to line up" (should be its. 'It's' is the contraction of 'it is', while 'its' is the possessive of it)
and this is my second:
You have little to no punctuation and that annoys me so probably fix that. It makes the poem seem more polished an easier to read.
Do you see this? I have TWO CRITIQUES. JUST TWO. This happens like once in a blue moon and you do not know how agitated this makes me. You have driven me to the edge with your near-perfection.
Great job (wow that doesn't even describe it I should probably come up with higher praise than that)
and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WOMAN keep writing!!!
-ladcat13
Thank you so much! I'm really touched that it got such a good response. I'm glad you enjoyed it. It was one of those poems that brews in your mind until its ready to flow out of you. I took both critiques and fixed the issues. Thank you so much!
My pleasure
Hello, thecolorofthesky! Hope you're having a good day. Just vva here, dropping a little review for you!
Before we get into that, though, I want to give you a warm welcome to the YWS forum. I haven't actually seen you around up until now, but you've definitely made a good first impression with this poem. But enough empty praise! Onto the review...!
Telling a story through poetry is difficult. It's relatively easy to share emotion or an idea through poetry, but retelling an experience (at least for me personally) is a much more challenging thing to do. So, I'd like to congratulate you on your ability to do just that: to momentarily pause time and share something that happened.
This is a pretty good start to your poem. Your opening line is very simple and straight to the point. Starting off here gives you great opportunity to play around with emotional levels. It's a solid and memorable entrance with strong energy, but you don't set the emotional bar so high that it's hard to follow. I do feel, however, that not much advantage was taken of said opportunity. This isn't a boring poem -- it just lacks those emotional shifts that make a strong impact. (Don't get the wrong idea, though, you did make an impact). Also! Stargazing is one whole word.
Not a lot to observe or comment on here, I just wanted to let you know that I absolutely [i]love[i/] this metaphor. [i]Round entity.[i/]
The opening image in this verse is also really gorgeous. I love linking the craters to scars. Gee whiz, that's poetic! I only have two nitpicks.
The molten thoughts flow out of the narrators' lips. The key word here is lips, which implies that the narrator is speaking. However, rather than speaking. The flow out of the lips, so they're talking, right? But then, in the next line, it says 'I wonder'. So are they speaking or just thinking? Or both? If so, then I don't know if it's too necessary to establish that they're thinking as they speak. You wouldn't speak if you hadn't thought of anything to say, right? Don't swear it, though. I have the bad habit of looking into things, and I wouldn't be able to look into something so minuscule. My other nitpick:
The right word here would be of, not off. Unless you place a comma in between out and off.
And this? Is beyond beautiful. Both sections in italics are extremely smooth and fluid. They seem almost perfectly put together and no word or sentence feels out of place or misfit. Watercolor galaxies. AUGH! I wish I'd come up with that first!!! I envy your talent. That's such a great analogy, I mean, galaxies totally do look watercolor too. Typing that out makes me realize that you have some pretty strong analogy skills. Well done!
As for the last verse, I won't quote it because basically, everything I just wrote applies. The ending line is really beautiful. However, as I stated before, it would have had some more impact if there were some more emotional levels throughout the poem as a whole.
As I said in the beginning, your poem is also pretty similar to a story. Conventionally, a story has an arc, but since I don't think it was your intention to create something so similar to a story, I won't hold it against you. Instead, I'd like to congratulate you on this amazing piece! Don't stop the gorgeous images, awesome analogies or existentially introspective commentary and stay epic!
Hi there! I'd like to thank you for the review! I edited the piece with all the critiques. I'm excited over the reaction to this! Thank you so much! Glad you enjoyed!
I really liked this poem. It has beautiful meaning!
~Dogs
Beautiful!