Age Two

[everyadventure]

[take III, thanks to prince & hillwalker]

by age two you realize
the world is made for those
who are bigger, stronger

and you can't win an argument
with someone who's larger

at two, you learn
that all you love--
breast,
bottle,
binky,
crib--
will be taken from you
even though you weren't being bad

and when you are surrounded
by night's goblins and beasties
you must comfort yourself
because no one will come
to save you from shadow-terrors

by age two, people expect you
to stand alone on your own
two feet

[everyadventure]

Written as I listen to my 2-year-old crying after being put to bed :( Be strong, Mama, he'll fall asleep in a minute....

[Delta40]

I remember two year old daughters....sigh!

[hillwalker]

The 'terrible twos' encapsulated in another of your wonderful observations written as poetry.

And the way you use 'two feet' in the last line to contrast the overall passivity of being only two with the sudden independence of reaching that age is a masterstroke.

H

[PrinceMyshkin]

lines and details such as this


at two,
you learn
that all you love--
breast,
bottle,
binky,
crib--
will be taken from you


leap out at one with joy and love and the joy of loving!

However, your line-breaks throughout most of this poem have, at best, an absent-minded quality that adds little if anything to the flow of the poem.

[everyadventure]

@prince: I'm afraid both you and Hillwalker have found me out recently: I have NO sense of rhythm! In high school, everyone would clap along with the school's fight song, and I had to "clap synch" in the way others "lip synch." Sad but true. I spend much more time fiddling with line breaks than I do writing the poems!

[PrinceMyshkin]

@prince: I'm afraid both you and Hillwalker have found me out recently: I have NO sense of rhythm!

But how are you on breathing? Try saying any one of these last poems out loud. Ignore the line-breaks you've assigned them but speak as if to a good friend - and note, I assume, that there are places where you instinctively pause, the more emphatically to launch the next phrase or clause. Those pauses, for lack of any other or better reason, are your line breaks.

[everyadventure]

But how are you on breathing?
I've had 28 years of practice ;)

Thank you kindly for the merciful advice, as it was much needed!

There... is that any better? Or perhaps you'd be kind enough to demonstrate?

[hillwalker]

I've had 28 years of practice ;)


:lol: Unless you are critically short of breath and need to pause after each word or two Prince is correct in his advice about how to overcome your blind spot.

Most of my poems are free verse and so reading a piece out loud to check the phrasing and line-breaks is second nature before posting - it's surprising how many writers place a line break after 'the' and don't realise how out-of-place it looks.

Used properly they can aid reading, as well as to emphasize a change of pace or emphasis.

After three; one, two, three....

H

[PrinceMyshkin]

There... is that any better? Or perhaps you'd be kind enough to demonstrate?

This is how I'd do it:


Age Two

by age two you realize
the world is made for those
who are bigger, stronger

and you can't win an argument
with someone who's larger

at two, you learn
that all you love--
breast,
bottle,
binky,
crib--
will be taken from you
even though you weren't being bad

and when you are surrounded
by night's goblins and beasties
you must comfort yourself
because no one will come
to save you from shadow-terrors

by age two, people expect you
to stand alone on your own
two feet

alternate (more dramatic - melodramatic?) version of the last verse:


by age two, people expect you
to stand
alone
on your own two feet

[everyadventure]

@prince: Wow, is the first one really my poem? It reads beautifully! A rather shocking improvement.

Darn, I have GOT to get the hang of this!

Thanks everybody for helping my little poem reach its potential :)

[PrinceMyshkin]

@prince: Wow, is the first one really my poem?

Some of us (the more sanctimonious, perhaps?) would say that none of these are really our own poems, but each of us is the trumpet or drums or cellos &c that some hidden artificer had employed to deliver his or her song...



The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

(James Joyce (1882-1941), Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 5 (1916).)