Bury a Giant

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The poem builds its force through a sequence of imperatives and questions, and the strongest structural choice is the recurring "How do you," which sets up an incantatory rhythm before fracturing it. That fracture is most effective at "How do you / impugn the diabolical," where the question stem begins to dissolve into a list of accusations—"Attack. Abuse. Disown"—and the period-stopped single words enact a hardening of tone that the earlier line breaks do not. The clipped punctuation there does real work, slowing the reading and isolating each act.

The opening image of burying a giant promises a concrete, physical scale that the poem then largely abandons for abstraction. "Corral a myth" and "wipe a slate clean" move quickly into the conceptual, and by "change belief" and "worship in peace" the language is operating almost entirely in the register of ideas rather than image. The giant of the title is never seen again. The poem might gain by returning to that giant—giving it a body, a size, a weight in the ground—so that the abstractions about belief and betrayal have something tangible to press against.

The ending lands the poem's emotional stakes suddenly and effectively: "Can you teach me? / Mother. / Father." reframes the preceding catalogue as something inherited, addressed to specific figures rather than to a general "you." This is the poem's most affecting turn, and it arrives almost too fast. The single-word lines are doing a great deal of work to carry that revelation, and the reader may want one more beat—some small concrete detail of these parents—to feel the weight of what is being asked of them.

One point of friction is consistency of address. The "you" of the repeated questions seems general or rhetorical, while the closing "Mother. Father." retroactively suggests a specific addressee throughout. Clarifying whether the whole poem is spoken to the parents, or whether the address narrows only at the end, would sharpen the speaker's relationship to the questions being posed. The spacing irregularities around "How do you"—the stray non-breaking spaces—appear unintentional and break the visual pattern; if they are meant to signal hesitation, that intent could be made more deliberate, and if not, regularizing them would let the repetition register cleanly.

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That ending is amazing. Honestly, I don’t know that I can critique this one much. Most of these lines feel like they can’t really be changed.

The only section that maybe hit me a little less was “How do you / change belief, / worship in peace— / censure false prophets.” There might be room there, but take that with a grain of salt because the more I read it in isolation, the more I think I might be wrong. 

You’re already there with this one. That’s all the eyeballs and brainjuice I’ve got for you, but god damn, this one was good.

 that I don't need to say;
"Do unto Other as You Would Have Them do Unto You". 
Because it would make perfect sense, and since when is the "Human race " a sensible thing? I share your grief at the greed of the world. We are worse than our fellow animals. We teach our children hate and racism and prejudice. A good look at the world through unhappy glasses. Simple, effective language, not hard to figure out. ~ Geezer.