Comment on Erickson's "Free Entry Week 4"

This draft wavers between being interesting and falling flat. I think that the biggest problem with this is a pretty common one--it's an attempt to take on a gigantic subject with deep historical and personal roots and put it all into one poem. The refrain/title is intriguing. You have some nice images ("towering mosques of Timbuktu", "ornate mud palaces", "Black as Cain") but they tend to get overshadowed by abstractions like "soul", "life's challenges", or "the atrocities of history". It also tends to use a few cliched terms toward the end ("brighter than a thousand suns / Burning through the sands of time / Shedding light on the atrocities of history"). The draft gets a little melodramatic in lines 10-12. There are so many better ways to express this trauma, and I think they could easily be better fleshed out and nuanced. Overall, I think that this draft has a lot of potential if you put plenty of work into it.