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What Caught My Eye

I love colors... and I was also wondering if perhaps this was an actual dance from another culture, which is always nice to read about.

Favorite Aspects

There is a bit of imagery in here, which is nice and to be expected. No vibrant colors though... which is odd. Like, you have the sky and a forest and whatnot, but no colors are mentioned. You mention the sky/skies several times without any hint of color, and the sky changes colors like crazy. Maybe a wasted opportunity.

Hook
In my reviews, I like to focus a bit on the opening line(s) of a poem. Sometimes, people forget that a good hook is as important for a poem as it is for a story. It might be more important, in fact. Given the length of a poem, the intro (that hook) is a considerable percentage of the piece as a whole. It needs to be both functional and interesting to serve its purposes.

I definitely would have stopped reading after the first line if I was reading for pleasure. That is super conversational and bulky in language. Any poem that starts with the same line as the bible for no apparent reason also sets off alarms (I glanced through the rest immediately to see if this was actually religious... doesn't seem to be). The spark between lost minds... like two people walking toward the light of the other... that could have been a really nice starting point, but you drop it completely and don't complete the image.

At any rate, those first two lines could be VERY condensed. The second line doesn't seem to actually have anything to do with the first. I guess in short, it didn't work for me as a reader.

"It started with two sparks between lost minds
and hour by hour became as wind in summer times"

Literally the same thing you wrote, condensed and clearer. But again, the third line drops this thought completely. What happened to the image of those sparks... HOW was is as wind in summer? Complete the thought, yanno? It's a good one I think...

Language / Word Choice

There is a fair bit of repetition in here. Both in thought/description and word choice. Some of the repetition seems particularly ineffective... like "It has got dark without any lighten mark":

Dark means... no light. So, obviously there wouldn't be a "lighten mark"?
"has gotten" would be proper grammar.
The repetition of "lighten mark" seems random and unnecessary as well.

And the rhyme here drove me crazy. End of line rhymes are most effective if there is a pattern... a rhyme scheme. A purposeful pattern that you adopt and stick with. Otherwise, you set the reader up for rhymes that don't come... so they're forced to reread to see if they missed something or are just left disappointed. The dark/mark rhyme seems to be the reason why the whole statement exists... and the rhyme is distracting, while the phrase is sort of a "duh" moment. Not super effective there.

Imagery

There is some imagery here... but there could be so much more if you included the colors. And honestly, instead of using the words "light/dark"... maybe used two shades of a color. Robin's egg and navy. Red and pink. Lavender and eggplant. I mean... look how much more interesting those words are than just "dark" and "light". Once you have color combos in your head, images will come to you much easier.

Effect

I'll leave you with that. Hopefully, you won't get disheartened... we all start somewhere. This is also very clearly a first draft. We all have first drafts that could be much better. It's the nature of a draft. Good luck with any revisions you decide to do!





My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .