when its your time

Hi Robert,

I like the way you imagine death with so many different images, and then they all come together when you write your line 'love in its entirety'. I think that this is an idea that we've all thought about at one point or another, and that your poem provides your readers with another way to think about it, sort of a more comforting way to confront something that scares a whole lot of people in the world. However, you also end it with a question, which reminds us that no one living can ever really know.

Something that you might work on could be perhaps answering the questions that you pose throughout the poem. My thought would be that instead of stringing the questions along one after the other, you might use lines from the rest of the poem or new lines that you write to answer these questions. For instance when you ask 'what do you see?' you might answer it with a line, and then ask 'what do you smell?' and then answer that, etc. I think this might help the poem form a kind of resolution with itself, and it could also give it a kind of rhythm. No matter how you decided to do it though, I think that answering those questions that you pose however you see fit would definitely enrich your poem a little bit more. Great job, Robert, and do keep writing!

Kate Maciejowski

UVM Mentor