The Birds of the Summer

[EileenGreay]

I'd appreciate some help on this one, thanks in advance.

Fluttering frantically
nestled to the side Did you intend for the contradiction in states between frantic fluttering and nestling?
of their bath I think you need to think about what you want your lineation to achieve. 'Of their bath' as a single line gives the reader nothing - it's half an image.
filled to the brim
splashing, stretching Your approach to punctuation is interesting - you use it only three times in the entire poem, but don't seem to want to dispense with it entirely. If you want the poem to rush on in a single glimpse, experiment with removing punctuation entirely. Alternatively, if you want to produce more of a sense of structure, try inserting some more of it...
spilling water to the garden bed
refugees
from the blistering summer heat
family
bonding in simplicity
in simplicity... why the ellipsis here? What is being left unsaid?
content to breathe.

Thank you for posting this here, Expendable Youth. I think there are some good aspects to your poem, but as a whole it reads as very sparse. As a reader I would like more of a sense of texture, sound, light - watching birds play in a summer garden is a sensorily rich experience, but your poem doesn't convey this richness of experience. Perhaps a good exercise would be to imagine that your are trying to convey this sight to someone blind. This might be likened to your relationship with the reader - you are trying to convey an experience, your sight and touch and smell etc., to someone who's just reading, someone who's not there. Make it vivid and personal. Explore metaphor and colour, and really try and shape this image.

As I've commented above, you would do well to interrogate your use of lineation: really try and work out why you're breaking a line, and what it's going to achieve.

I hope that some of this feedback is useful, and I really look forward to reading more of your poetry.

Eileen