Piano Kid

UVM Mentor

Bjorn,
This is a really nice poem. Right from the get go you pull the reader in with a slight twist on a very familiar line. Now seemingly by adding so much distance to a line already about distance, we might find ourselves in a time before pianos. However, coupled with your next line: A kid played piano, it becomes a more personal concept. We get the sense that someone is looking back on their life. An older person might actually refer to their youth as having taken place "once upon a very long time ago".

The poem itself is short and sweet and does well to tell your story. The three-line stanza work well in the second two of that kind. In the second stanza though, the last two lines seem forced. I like the image of the piano kid drawing the audience's attention with his music, but you might work that imagery into some more comfortable lines.

Another note on the form side comes in reading your last stanza. The first line is 8 syllables, comprised of 8 words. The next line starts out nicely coupling two syllables into one word and repeating "c" and "ly". Then the pace picks back up with one syllable words leading to your rhyme, however you have five syllables. It's a subtle change, but in reworking that to flow with the tempo of the first line (8 syllables) the effect will be pleasing.

Finally, for all your poems, try writing them out in sentence form. Focus on punctuation. Right now, you have a comma after every line though it is often unnecessary. In other places, a period would do much better. For instance, I would say that each line in the second to last stanza is a sentence and should end in a period.

Good luck with this.

Kurt