Parted A Long Time Ago

I'm not very fond of rhyming poetry but I've seen several poems that were quite wonderful that rhymed so I thought I'd give it a try. A fast write so I'm open for critique (as always).

 

My room’s peach clouds and yellow sky

warm the winter night but now I

have to cool it with white sheets and

some cotton blanket snow. My hand

drifts, picks at jumbled dreams that fell

from behind my eyelids. Who’ll tell

me when you go? Who now would know

that once we made high places low

and painted sky with lightning spears

that rent our selves in half. The fears

of thunder overcame it all

but the momentary bodies’ call,

motion in the clouds and languor

of our lips - long past . Yet I dare,

in my whitened dreams, to see you,

not old or dead as must be true,

but slinging bolts and raining jest.

I dare not find you. Yellow rest

and warm peach sleep, as I’ve been told,

preclude a former marriage. Hold

your martial hand away from someone

else’s face, and leave us all alone,

the ones you claimed to love. But

let me warm, cool my unwise blood

in dreams of lively storms raging

through our world, lost and aging

Reviews

[Michael]

Give that rhyming is not your favorite thing to do, I think it is a good sound effort. Perhaps it is the sing-song nature of simple rhymes that give you pause when reading them. Give some thought to the more complex rhymes to give the work more depth. Above you used rhyming couplets. I have found couplets (AABBCC... rhyme) to lend themselves more to humor or song style poetry. With the complexity of your theme (and I really do like it), I would suggest trying something like aBcB and putting some space between the rhymes. You also come very close to having the work with an even meter, perhaps blank verse will appeal to you.

Having said all that, you write very capable rhyming poetry. There are a couple of spots that burp a bit but I think everyone who writes couplets finds that to be the case now and then.

Good work!

[Ed Hart]

a life well lived in blends memories and words such as this...oh, the rhyming went by unnoticed...

[Spat Queen]

I think too much discipline stifles creativity most of the time. I think this worked out perfectly.

[Tomás Ó C..]

I love the rhyme and flow of the poem...

[PianoandPage]

this is rhyming poetry i can get behind. although really it isn't rhyming so much... it is and isn't. the rythmn and line breaks... led you through the ryhme and into the next line so smoothly that you almost don't notice.

i absolutely adored the images of lightning and dreams. blood and sheets. the room and the colors. how you become the space of memory.

lovely write. this was off the cuff? you amaze.

[Ninelilies]

"but slinging bolts and raining jest"

Image of Zeus?

When I read it, I thought of a person in real thought about love for their other half, the endurance of their relationshipe, hopes for the future, and actually seeing themselves as old but not feeble. Good work.

[W.k.kortas]

I found a couple of the line breaks a little odd (the third and fifth lines), and the rhyme scheme seems a bit scatter-shot here and there, but otherwise I found the flow to be very free and natural; sometimes, it's easy to fall into the trap of end rhyme equals end of thought, and that can lead to very unnatural and forced wording. There's no such trouble here; the pacing is very smooth and natural, and there's no square-peg rhyming disrupting the flow of ideas.