The Makeover

Between These Lines

A poem about trying to write a poem

I gave an old poem a new lease of life — written in response to The Makeover prompt in Paper Poetry.

Before / The Original

Line after line, I want to lay my sins bare — My flaws and my thoughts behind a foliage of despair. So pretty and pretentious, my petals they deceive. Admire from afar but my thorns are hurting me. Line after line, standing evergreen as pine. Before my bark is etched, I consider every line As the scars of a wretch, like the rings of a tree, I would die if they could read into the lines of my entity. So line after line I write, I cannot let them cross these lines into the hollow of my nature, So silently I smile.

— 13 March 2014

After / The Makeover

Line after line, still a hollow page of lines, weeping ink, and blotted memories, a book with broken spine, a kind so rare and out of reach like a tree growing from a steep, admire from below where the scars cannot be seen, like the rings under my bark with stories in between these lines I write, I try to write, if only you could read.

— 8 January 2023

The Process

I wrote the original poem in 2014. I wanted to give this poem a makeover as some of the descriptions felt cliché. I realised a few things throughout the process:

• I learnt that although it is a ‘rule’ in traditional poetry to begin each line with a capital letter (as we were taught in school), we do not have to be restricted to such rules in creative writing — thank you, Carolyn Hastings, for pointing this out to me.
• I practiced free verse. Instead of writing within a rigid meter and rhyme scheme, I tried to allow the thoughts and feelings to dictate how the poem was to be expressed —with the length of lines to manipulate speed, and the use of rhyme to emphasise certain moments.
• I thought I couldn’t write, but then I did.