Title: Altar Golem
Poet: RavenoftheBlack
Status: Public
Word Count: 231

This is for the voting "week" of February.

I never know what much to say about these poems, having so little experience with poetry myself.

I like how you weaved an almost Innistrad feeling into the little story here, though. I could even see something like this existing on Innistrad, where the prayers of the faithful are what command the golem to rise and protect them.

I'm fascinated by the scheme here: it creates a sense of incompleteness that seems to echo the golem's own incomplete nature. I'm curious: do you intend for it to be read with a pause after each quintet, or should the reader just plow straight through? they both work, but they create different effects so I'm curious which was intended.

that said, there's a couple wording bits here that I'm not in love with:

"It casts its threat across the land" feels like... I don't know what it means. like, I can infer the intent but it breaks the flow to have to piece together an intention from words that don't quite mean what they're being used to mean. I might maybe change it to "it casts its shadow on the land", which I think is an interesting juxtaposition of imagery since you just established that it's being caused by sound. you're also changing tenses in that stanza, going from "flexed" and "rose" to "make", "casts", and "tells". changing line 2 to match the rest of it breaks the meter, though, so honestly I might just swap out that whole couplet: the strength of the stanza is on the triplet anyway. here's a swing, feel free to ignore:



on a related note I might switch stanza 2 to be present-tense as well, that doesn't really jangle the meter much (you'd have to change "faded into night" to "fades into the night" to make up for a dropped syllable, but fortunately "into" is metrically flexible so that's fine, and the rest of the tense shifts wouldn't affect the foot.) and it better aligns it with where the story seems to become present.

the line "Though what each glowing glyph controls, Are answers we will be denied," is fine poetically, but it feels uncharacteristically tongue-in-cheek for the piece. if you don't mind the slant rhyme you could go "Is lost within the sands of time" although that's a bit cliche.

in "And fears for neither flesh nor wraith," "fears for" feels awkward. "And fears no creature, flesh or wraith"?

stanza 6 feels confusing to me. I think it's because you're trying to spread a single thought across two lines, but the meter forces emphasis on the "on" which doesn't fit with the structure of the overall sentence, so I read "Cannot forever trample on" as its own independent idea, and then have no context for the next line.

I'm nitpicking here, but it's mostly 'cause I really like a lot about this poem and I think with a couple tweaks it could be even better. I think I'm gonna vote NAI for now, even though I like it, just 'cause I think polishing it more would be easy and I'd want to see that polish done.