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Aug 06, 2026
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Nostalgia
Recapturing moments through broken glass— Where splintered time and shadows pass, each shard holds a ghost, a frozen frame, of love, of loss, of whispered name.
Plagued with visions of your laugh, your love, your smile.
And all the arguments we had, now seem so juvenile.
My mother, my father, you were and always will be.
Your love, your compassion, your efforts, are forever etched within me.
The pain of your absence lingers,
no relief despite my prayers.
My beating heart is out of rhythm,
left struggling to find the snare.
Seconds crawl to
to minutes,
minutes drag their feet, hours slump like drunks against the morning's gray defeat.
I ask God nightly, 'Why did You take them away?' Silence answers, cold and gray, yet I kneel again to pray.
Leaving me shattered and broken, unsure of where the pieces belong.
Faintly, hearing whispers, encouraging me to remain strong.
As a child, I stayed hidden under your wings,
protected and safe, nothing could harm me.
Now I'm afraid, alone, and in fear of everything.
Yearning for comfort, seeking the love only parents can bring.
It seems God has distance for my dreary circumstance.
My cries left unheard, in a state of irrelevance.
— Andrea Elrod, Aug 06, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Free verse
Review Request Direction:
What did you think of my title?
How was my language use?
What did you think of the rhythm or pattern or pacing?
How does this theme appeal to you?
How was the beginning/ending of the poem?
Is the internal logic consistent?
Review Request Intensity: I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing Stage: Final polish
Critiques
neopoet
1 week 3 days ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem carries genuine emotional weight, and its subject — grief for lost parents — is handled with evident sincerity. The strongest moment is the time sequence in the middle stanza: "Seconds crawl to minutes, minutes drag their feet, hours slump like drunks against the morning's gray defeat." That line earns its imagery; the personification feels earned rather than decorative, and "slump like drunks" is a concrete, surprising choice that lands well.
The main area to develop is consistency of register and form. The poem opens with a compressed, imagistic style ("broken glass," "splintered time," "each shard holds a ghost") that promises a sustained metaphorical structure, but it then shifts into more plainly stated feeling — "Now I'm afraid, alone, and in fear of everything" — and the opening glass metaphor is never returned to or resolved. Choosing one path or the other, and following it through, would strengthen cohesion considerably. There are also moments where rhyme pulls the poem toward less precise language: "juvenile" is a somewhat thin word chosen to pair with "smile," and "irrelevance" feels like a reach to close the final stanza. Where the poem trusts image and rhythm over end-rhyme, as in the drunken hours line, it is noticeably more alive. Relaxing the rhyme scheme — or committing to it more rigorously and evenly — would allow the language to settle into something more consistently its own.
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EyeAmI
1 week 3 days ago
I like the rhythm, but I…
I like the rhythm, but I love the subject.
Far too often I feel that parents are under appreciated.
To explain the way you saw them, at different stages of your life hits hard, at least for me.
Having them gone, is a haunting feeling, that I don’t know yet.
So to have it expressed by someone who seemingly knows the feeling, is strong with the description, and puts me in the shoes of the author, that’s the type of art I came here for.
I don’t think the piece has strict rhymes throughout, there was maybe one or two times where I didn’t find the rhyme.
But it doesn’t take away from the context. Overall I’d say this was better than anything I’ve written, that’s for sure.
EyeAmI
1 week 3 days ago
I like the rhythm, but I…
I like the rhythm, but I love the subject.
Far too often I feel that parents are under appreciated.
To explain the way you saw them, at different stages of your life hits hard, at least for me.
Having them gone, is a haunting feeling, that I don’t know yet.
So to have it expressed by someone who seemingly knows the feeling, is strong with the description, and puts me in the shoes of the author, that’s the type of art I came here for.
I don’t think the piece has strict rhymes throughout, there was maybe one or two times where I didn’t find the rhyme.
But it doesn’t take away from the context. Overall I’d say this was better than anything I’ve written, that’s for sure.
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