My Dearest Sister

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

This poem trades on a single dominant image—bleeding—and it is worth examining how hard that word is working across the piece. It appears first as synaesthetic abundance ("the days bled - oranges and tangelos"), then as a wound that will not close in the closing lines. That arc, from the bleed of ripeness to the bleed of grief, is the strongest structural idea in the poem, and it deserves to be protected. As written, though, the word is asked to carry too much. "We gorged ourselves black - with berries" already reaches toward staining and surfeit, and "an end-day sky bleeding" repeats the color-as-spilling gesture again before the final stanza arrives to spell it out six times. By the time the repetition begins, the reader has encountered the verb so often that its final insistence reads as accumulation rather than escalation. Consider reserving "bleed" for the abundance early and the grief late, and finding other verbs for the middle images, so the ending lands as a return rather than a continuation.

The sensory inventory of the second stanza is the most alive writing here. "Her ice-cream blue tongue, licking at our hands and faces" gives the sea a body and an appetite in a way that earns its strangeness, and "black-eyed cockabullies" is specific and unsentimental, the kind of particular detail that persuades a reader the childhood was real and not merely invoked. By contrast, "the colours of our dreams" does the opposite work: it abstracts what the surrounding lines have made concrete. Lines like that one, and "running our bodies dry with laughter," lean on familiar phrasing where the poem is otherwise reaching for the unfamiliar. Trust the cockabullies over the dreams.

The line "your white knuckle-bone body - / melting into pools of summer" is doing something quietly more complicated than it first appears, and it may be the emotional hinge of the poem. "Knuckle-bone" introduces thinness, fragility, perhaps illness, into a scene of play, and "melting" suggests dissolution rather than mere coolness. If the sister of the title is lost or dying, that reading is available but underdeveloped; the poem never decides how much it wants the reader to see. The closing repetition of "bleed" implies ongoing loss, yet the body in the water is the only image that gestures toward what is being lost. Strengthening the connection between that fragile body and the unstopping wound of the final stanza would give the ending its grief by inheritance rather than by assertion.

On the form: the staggered descent of the final lines, with "still / still / they / bleed.." broken across single words, attempts to enact slowing or faltering. This works better as silence than as visual gesture. The doubled "still" is genuinely effective—the word means both unmoving and continuing, and the repetition lets both meanings sound at once. The trailing two dots, however, where a deliberate ellipsis or full stop would read as a choice, suggest a typographical accident rather than an intention. Settle the punctuation so the held breath at the end feels controlled.

A smaller note: "the years of our shared childhoods" is slightly redundant, since shared childhoods are years, and the plural "childhoods" for two people in one shared experience reads oddly. "Our shared childhood" or simply "our childhood" would be cleaner and would let "shared" carry the weight. The opening two lines are otherwise a generous, clear invitation into the poem, and the gesture of taking a hand returns usefully nowhere—you might consider whether the ending wants to close that frame, returning to the hand that opened it.

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I really enjoyed this. I obviously can’t personally identify with sisterhood, lol, but that didn’t matter, because the poem still felt intimate and personal in a way I could enter. The fruit, the sea, the laughter, and the body-memory of childhood all carried real tenderness for me. The only place I paused was the divider before returning to the sea, where I wasn’t sure if the silence was meant to deepen the memory or separate me from it, but “Her ice-cream blue tongue” really stayed with me.

Reflections remembered, as I lost my younger sister to covid back in 2021..