Those School Days (revised)
as crisp as the blowing, ocean breeze.
The ending of an elongated era
a step taken forward in history.
My formal schooling has finally come to a close
like a stealthy door quietly joining its doorpost.
A door that's been swung open day after day
with hinges hanging loosely, at last detached.
The caps took many ticking clocks to arrive
as if it purposefully assumed a snail's pace.
While the bus missed me going to graduation
I surely knew I wouldn't miss it once gone.
Then gone, I didn't know how much I truly would miss:
1. The time dedicated for breaks and sick days
2. The view when commuting for my 9-hour day
3. The chances given for getting things wrong
The sight of my "declaration of independence" was
liberating, but the rushed in adulthood - debilitating.
And yet, the combination of both gave form to a
freedom, interlocked with meaning - responsibility.
Thanks for sharing this poem. It gives us a good chance to look more closely at the first lesson I am trying to teach in the course: how to show rather than just tell about emotions, experiences, and ideas that are important to you. Poetry is an art of showing--that is, of using descriptive language that appeals to the senses to bring things more alive.
ReplyDeleteThis poem relies on abstractions: For example the "freedom" in the first and last stanzas and the word "graduation" instead of images associated with graduation. I would love to see you replace come of these abstractions with descriptive imagery.
The poem is also in a prosy style. It reads a bit like prose with line breaks. That's not a bad place to start, but over the course of this class, I hope to teach you how to write with more attention to how your words sound. It really helps to read the poem aloud to yourself while writing.
My favorite part is the description of the door and hinge in stanza two, because these are things I can see.
But in general, I really hope to see more work on showing rather than telling, as we have been discussing in class. We'll talk about this more soon.
It's a minor thing, but I find the yellow font on white background to be hard to read.
I really love the voice in this poem. The only thing I think needs to be fixed is you switch back and forth between tenses a lot and it kind of jars the reader to be thrown from past to present to future. I think maintaining a solid tense throughout would make it that much stronger!
ReplyDeleteThe progression of this poem is really nice. It allows me to feel the months and years passing, I can tell it's reminiscent of good times and stressful times. I like how the end leads from something looked forward to so excitedly to a new obstacle for the next part of life. There are some tenses that don't match up in the same stanza, like in the third stanza: "I surely wouldn't miss it when I'm gone".
ReplyDelete