10-03-2015, 02:48 PM
I love the emotion you express here without going to any great length of wording to accomplish it. Lots of lines with four or fewer words, and it works very nicely. It's something I myself struggle a great deal with when writing.
For criticisms, I would lose the word repetition in the first, second, and fourth stanzas. Find synonyms for "long","wish", "hurts", "lack", and "fall" and replace one word of each pair with them, because this little structural detail distracts from the actual feeling and "from the heart" honesty of the poem, as it is mostly abandoned as a structural regularity half way through.
The first two lines of the sixth stanza, "But if I am the leaf, No shoe has cared enough to notice me," are fantastic! I absolutely love them.
However, these two lines really sucked the wind out the six lines that followed them ("To come across me... - ...To make me crunch.") My immediate assumption after the first two lines was that the leaf was not being stepped on, ignored, left to decay (or be swept away or something else of that nature). The following six just reiterate the point without adding any more emotion or detail to it. The "it will be too late for love when it finds me" message of the 7th stanza gets a little lost because of this. "I may be shriveled and soggy" is a good opening line for it, but the other three lines just let me go without taking me anywhere new or interesting.
The last stanza is excellent. I read it as being honest, hopelessly so, and even accepting of the situation to a degree. It makes me sad, and that makes me happy to have read this. Thank you!
For criticisms, I would lose the word repetition in the first, second, and fourth stanzas. Find synonyms for "long","wish", "hurts", "lack", and "fall" and replace one word of each pair with them, because this little structural detail distracts from the actual feeling and "from the heart" honesty of the poem, as it is mostly abandoned as a structural regularity half way through.
The first two lines of the sixth stanza, "But if I am the leaf, No shoe has cared enough to notice me," are fantastic! I absolutely love them.
However, these two lines really sucked the wind out the six lines that followed them ("To come across me... - ...To make me crunch.") My immediate assumption after the first two lines was that the leaf was not being stepped on, ignored, left to decay (or be swept away or something else of that nature). The following six just reiterate the point without adding any more emotion or detail to it. The "it will be too late for love when it finds me" message of the 7th stanza gets a little lost because of this. "I may be shriveled and soggy" is a good opening line for it, but the other three lines just let me go without taking me anywhere new or interesting.
The last stanza is excellent. I read it as being honest, hopelessly so, and even accepting of the situation to a degree. It makes me sad, and that makes me happy to have read this. Thank you!