A medicine that heals with just a drop;
The one and only force of gentle love.
If life's a sentence, this is the full-stop.
Eternal peace without a mourning dove.
When life betrays your childhood hope and dreams,
When fear invades your brain and rips apart
The love you built: it segregates the seams.
Your friends can press the button marked .
The joy in life cannot be made alone,
For only two or more can see the light.
As one, the friends can kill the evil hate
To show that love should be a human right.
The ones in power never seem to care
About the love of friends: so pure, so bare.
The one and only force of gentle love.
If life's a sentence, this is the full-stop.
Eternal peace without a mourning dove.
When life betrays your childhood hope and dreams,
When fear invades your brain and rips apart
The love you built: it segregates the seams.
Your friends can press the button marked .
The joy in life cannot be made alone,
For only two or more can see the light.
As one, the friends can kill the evil hate
To show that love should be a human right.
The ones in power never seem to care
About the love of friends: so pure, so bare.
Press the button and let the magic unfold.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, your iambic meter is perfect. Flawless. And you're now confidently using caesura and enjambement, and mono- and poly-syllabic words, to make even more sophisticated your grasp of poetic scansion. Well done! An impressive achievement.
ReplyDeleteMy targets for this piece are related to a handful of your choices of words and images. I love lines 1-2, but Line 3, whilst complex, leaves me unclear whether you are saying something positive or not; similarly, Line 4 leaves me a bit unclear.
The next quatrain would be fantastic were it just for a slight change of punctuation. Using the colon places the wrong emphasis on the fantastic, alliterative metaphor that follows; swap "it" for "and", and no punctuation is required, and end the line with a comma rather than a full stop. Hope that makes sense?
I like the next quatrain, but I think it is weakened by your insistence on using the Definite Article before "joy" and "evil hate": it just doesn't work for me, and this might all need shifting around a bit.
Finally, in the final couplet, good idea, but: "the ones" seems a weak phrase to me; and I worry that "bare" might fall into the rhyme trap a little.
Don't get me wrong though: that I am commenting about such details is evidence that you have mastered so many of the skills that we are now honing your skills at an advanced level.
Message to all: the next task will be posted a bit later than usual so expect some delay, please.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
I love l3, "If life's a sentence, this is the full-stop." I find it particularly powerful and meaningful as you present very strong, almost violent images of life without friendship and how much a friend can bring peace and closure to your fears.
ReplyDeleteIt moved me.
You have some lovely ideas in here as the others have said. I think in your next poem, you shoul try to pick just one or two types of extended metaphor/diction to use in your poem rather than using words from all sorts of images (here you have dictions of grammar, animals, death, a cool image of computing technology, sewing, childhood and medicine). This is really creative, but I think you may show even more ingenuity by extending one particular metaphor.
ReplyDeleteRead Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 116 for an example; the prevalent metaphor here is of the maritime, which creates one very strong image, though explores many facets of the subject through this idea. Choosing one association like this may help you to focus your ideas and pack even more punch!