Young Writers Society

Hey there writingbright. I was just going through my review drafts and saw that I had never finished my review on your lovely little poem here.

My comments today are a mixture of technical and the actual content of the poem. To start with, there's some parts of the line breaks that set me off a little bit with how many words there are in each line. It's not the inconsistency as much as it's the sound of each line and how the longer lines after the short lines do lag a little bit. Punctuation would actually do you a lot of good. Flow seems to have been left out of the process for how this poem is pieced together and that's something to think about if you go forward with another draft.

The troublesome part about this content for me is how often you jump between different points of thought without anything to stitch all of the ideas together. People often compare the writing of a poem to that of creating a quilt, where each colorful portion is going to differ from the others, but there has to be something to put everything together at the very end. This poem feels like there needs to be at least one more stanza of content, with the aim of drawing conclusions, so that the narrator's different veins of thought don't seem so sudden in their shifts.

There's a lot of good imagery examples in this poem, if I do separate it from the other issues. I think adding in more color based imagery might help for the different imagery schemes to match up. Talking about the red colors of autumn is a good entrance point to talk about how the other colors of the other points of focus might add to the mood that you're trying to form. There are colors that can be connected to the word "empty" that can bring about many different moods depending on what you choose.

This is a good start and I hope you decide to do a second draft of this poem.
Happy February.
- Jack

Loved reading this! It's easy to read and simple without seeming childish.
I really liked the imagery, especially at the end. "peaceful, like a bird in flight" really creates an atmosphere, especially when contrasted with "death is in the air".
Thanks for sharing your poem, have a great day

Hi! I loved this poem.
First of all, I just like the way the poem looks; the all lowercase letters and short lines provide for easy reading.
The line

a million homes

peaceful, like a bird in flight

stand taller than a skyscraper

like a flash of lightning
striking high above the rooftops