Beautiful text, but what makes it a poem?
This one will probably do better in Cafe Society rather than General Questions.
Moved.
samclem Moderator, GQ
There are a couple of points that would point to the poem-nature of this text. Most importantly: the lines break not at the end of the page, but at points determined by the writer. A prose text will usually break wherever it’s convenient for the printer to break it, but a poem breaks in a determined fashion, so that it becomes analytically important.
Secondly, I would argue that poetry is when the analytic toolkit of poetry interpretation can be profitably applied. Take this line:
It repeats the same sentence construction “give…”, “give..”, but modifies it in the final instance to “give back…”
In the same vein, note how the mirror appears in the first and the last paragraph; how the words “eat” and “sit” each get their own sentence; or how, in the first paragraph, the lines break after “elation”, “arriving”, and “welcome,” all positively connoted words – rather than, for example, at “when”, or “at”. If any of this can be used to interpolate a possible meaning, using the tools of poetry, why, that’s poetry.