[brigits_flame] prompt - ember

[1stmate]

Alone/Together

It never gets dark here.
The city is full of people
but is completely void of life.
That fire burned brightly once,
a lifetime ago, it seems:
everything in its path was consumed,
more than we can know.
Yet the cinders still glow
hotter than they have any right to.
Our flames burned
uncoupled. Across millions of lives,
the fight never ends.
Sentiments will always travel
without hope.
We are nothing.

We are nothing
without hope.
Sentiments will always travel;
the fight never ends.
Uncoupled across millions of lives,
our flames burned
hotter than they have any right to,
yet the cinders still glow
more than we can know.
Everything in their path was consumed
a lifetime ago, it seems:
that fire burned brightly once
but is completely void of life.
The city is full of people;
it never gets dark here.

---

author notes: truc_d_ouf's poem for week three of august used a similar reflective pattern which was shamelessly stolen for this entry, though something different came of the reflection in this piece. credit for that idea! dedicated to my platonic partner, who rambled at me over the phone for half an hour while i scribbled ideas and muttered incoherently before the poem itself would deign to be written.

Comments

[silverflight8.livejournal.com]

Late editor is delinquent and embarrassingly late, but here is your second edit!

without hope.
We are nothing.

We are nothing
without hope.
This is particularly wonderful! Actually I think the whole poem's structure is marvellous, but, you know, this direct contrast is especially. I think it must be the sudden reversal of pessimism into something resembling optimism.

Sentiments will always travel;
the fight never ends.
-The sentiments part seems unhinged here, and I don't mean crazy, just that it is seemingly uncoupled from anything else around it. What does sentiments mean? (Thanks to tumblr, I'm getting images of Loki, but anyway).

yet the cinders still glow
more than we can know.
-A little more obvious here than in the previous stanza, because there's no punctuation, but glow/know rhymes unexpectedly and kind of throws off the unrhymed rest of the poem. (Like the poet/don't know it sense.)

everything in its path was consumed,
more than we can know.
-This, too, is somewhat confusing. We don't know what everything was? Mostly I am having these question marks everywhere because some parts of the poem are quite clear and it's a poem that's not coyly trying to hide its meaning, but there are some parts that don't seem to quite match up to the other lines around it.

our flames burned
hotter than they have any right to,
-Changing tenses here (burned/have any right to) - not a problem in the previous stanza where you have this sentence coupled with another line.

our flames burned
-(in the second stanza) I think you should put some kind of punctuation at the end of this, because my eyes just jumped right to the next line without pausing to take in the burned bit. It really is the central idea of the poem.

There are a few places where I think that the line lengths were a little odd (especially hotter than they have any right to, - I'm still not sure about the "have any right to" part) but I'm not sure if that would be doable with your current structure.

Again, I really enjoyed the format you used! This is excellent.

[1stmate]

I've messed around with this a bit before getting this edit (though most of your stuff still applies!) and I thought I should tell you that I could not figure out what bothered me about the glow/know lines, but I rearranged so the know-line ends in yet instead. Now I know what was vaguely irritating! hahaha. I feel pretty strongly about rhyming (it's good! but only if everything is rhyming), but somehow I didn't consciously notice those lines. *headdesk*

I am contemplating completely removing the 'hotter than they have any right to' line. Or maybe I would like something there. Maybe, hmm, 'improbably hot' or, or, something. I don't know! But it's a thought I am thinking. Other thoughts revolve around 'more than we can ever know' (which I guess I also changed since posting hahaha).

Though. The tense change in burned/have any right to is something I, hmm, I don't have a problem with? I think it's one of those tense changes that, it's not a bad thing, it's. It's sort of saying "they didn't have that right then, and they still don't now." I don't think it'd be incorrect to use that. Like, "I poked you in the arm yesterday, even though I'm not supposed to." It implies a continuity. In my head! Am I wrong about this? I'm probably wrong about this. I'm probably starting to think like the people around me! oh no! I speak better than them; I shouldn't let myself get dragged down by their verbal patterns! (and yet, it happens. allllll the time.) Anyway, I mean, this is a thing I'm going to try to remove from the poem, but now I'm curious is Everything I Know Is Wrong and whatnot :P

You are so right about this structure making anything but the tiniest changes immensely difficult. But so much fun! I can't say that enough.

Continued editing for the purposes of submitting to places. Am wondering ... hmm, too many things for a public comment. I CANNOT KEEP TRACK OF MY LIFE, SILVER.