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Fragments of the Stolen Self
I am Julie, the name I bear,
An evocative Durga, fierce and rare.
Author of tales, my pen bleeds ink—
A poet whose words force worlds to think.
A singer of notes that haunt the air,
A songwriter weaving emotions bare.
A musician’s soul strums through my art,
An artist sketching shadows of my heart.
A mother with arms, yet empty space,
Capricorn climbing life’s rugged face.
A Catholic Witch with faiths entwined,
Light and shadow, both are mine.
Half Polish blood, cold winds of yore,
One quarter Ojibwe, truths and lore.
One quarter African, resilient ground,
The weight of history’s chains profound.
Fifty percent of me claimed the lands,
Stealing from twenty-five percent's hands.
To oppress the other quarter with wrath—
My bloodline tangled, a twisted path.
And here I stand, a fractured line,
History’s sorrow etched in my spine.
Yet fire burns, I sing and create,
Weaving my soul through the threads of fate.
About This Poem
Style/Type: Free verse
Review Request Direction: [This option has been removed]
Review Request Intensity: I appreciate moderate constructive criticism
Editing Stage: Not actively editing
Critiques
neopoet
1 day 6 hours ago
Neopoet AI (premium) [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's central conceit—identity as arithmetic, the self parsed into halves and quarters—becomes most arresting in the fifth stanza, where the fractions stop being descriptive and turn against one another. The lines about fifty percent stealing from twenty-five percent's hands give the poem its real subject: a single body holding both oppressor and oppressed. This is the most original move here, and the poem would gain by trusting it earlier, since the opening stanzas keep the reader in the territory of self-description before this tension arrives.
The phrase "Catholic Witch with faiths entwined" works because it states a contradiction plainly and lets it stand, and "Light and shadow, both are mine" earns its place by following directly from that image. Similarly, "A mother with arms, yet empty space" lands through restraint—the gap it names is felt rather than explained.
Some of the earlier figures lean on familiar pairings that do less work: "my pen bleeds ink," "words force worlds to think," and "weaving emotions bare" reach for intensity through stock phrasing rather than through specific image. The poem is strongest when it is concrete (the fractions, the entwined faiths) and weaker when it asserts feeling in the abstract. One path forward would be to replace a phrase like "notes that haunt the air" with a particular sound, instrument, or moment, letting a single detail carry the claim the abstraction currently makes.
The rhyme scheme is steady, but a few rhymes bend the syntax to land—"cold winds of yore" and "truths and lore" introduce archaic diction that sits oddly against the contemporary, plainspoken voice elsewhere. Loosening the insistence on full rhyme in those spots might let the language stay in one register.
Finally, the closing stanza returns to the language of fate and fire, which is serviceable but more general than the bloodline material that precedes it. Given how specific and unsettling the fifth stanza is, a resolution that engaged that internal division directly—rather than resolving into "threads of fate"—would give the ending the same charge the middle of the poem has already established.
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nokros
4 days 14 hours ago
Hi Julie. A powerful piece…
.. resonating well with my inner self. Daring yet serene.
Geezer
4 days 8 hours ago
It took...
me a couple of run throughs, but I managed to get through the ending, in a fairly smooth rhythm. I rather fancy myself as an orator of sorts, and story-telling mode is one way to get a good rhythm going. An orator needs good direction from the author to read it properly and unless he/she are right there... punctuation and the right words are the key. ~ Good job in presenting a rather interesting story in rhyme. ~ Geezer.
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