She looks back:
on who she was, who she loved
who she used to be–
and looks back not with regret or loss or sadness
but with the purest feeling of reminiscence
because who is she to hate what can never be changed?
who are the people that gaze back and then avert their eyes because they don’t like what they see?
she looks back with love, with adoration, with a smile.
with all the feeling of acceptance
Poetry
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This is such a great piece about the magnitude and ecstasy of our origins! As growing human beings, we tend to look back on our past with a sense of embarrassment or utmost despair. To clarify, either we did something that was incredibly humiliating, or we made a decision that resulted in a sequence of bad events, or something suddenly occurred that wound up scarring us for a long duration of time. Essentially, when it comes down to it, life is not just an uphill climb. Things that knock us down a few pegs are more than likely to happen, and because we associate those things with negative feelings, we strive to forgot them. In other words, we do not want to remember the bad. However, this poem serves as a crucial reminder that it is the bad things that transpire that help us to build character. We go through disastrous periods because they obligate us to learn and develop a thicker skin. If we never made mistakes – if we never experienced moments that impose upon us some sort of conflict or inner turmoil – then we would never evolve into better human beings. Thus, as your poem clearly says, we should actually be thankful for our past, even for the occasions that weren’t so light-hearted, because they are the very foundations in which our entire persona is crafted: “she looks back with love, with adoration, with a smile. / with all the feeling of acceptance.” Truly, I believe that this is a piece that everyone should be read because it is so, so important. We cannot be entirely callous towards our past when it is the essential ingredient consequently shaped us into knowledgeable, realistic, understanding, genuine human beings. Very, very well done!
If there is anything that I would advice revising about this article, it is lines 2 and 3 of this poem: “on who she was, who she loved / who she used to be -” In my opinion, the phrases “who she was” and “who she used to be” are synonymous with each other. They both serve as a reference as to how the narrator acted in the past as a whole. Thus, my suggestion would be to change one of these phrases into something different. Perhaps you could go with something more specific as you did with the phrase “who she loved”; maybe you could allude to the narrator’s prior morals, world views, or convictions. Also, I did spot one silly mistake in the poem: in line 9, you placed a period after the word “smile” when I think your intent was to put a comma there (seeing that, you are delineating a list of things and this list continues into the next line). That being said, maybe you want to skim through the poem or two more times for potential errors to ensure that it came out EXACTLY as you wanted.
Seriously though, you did a marvelous job with this piece, and you should be proud!