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Hi @emma-starr,
<p style=”text-align: left;”>Okay, I can kind of see your theme now. Hmm…alright, these are just my thoughts, so take them or leave them, but I think that if your goal is to portray healing over the course of a year, you could experiment with the narrator struggling with an actual physical ailment that either gets better over the year (like a broken bone or something) or changes with the seasons and weave that physical healing in with the mental/emotional/spiritual healing. Does that make sense?</p>
And I’d tend to agree with you, fall seems a bit back and forth at the moment. I think you could either move fall to the beginning of the poem and make summer the end (which would break the whole calendar year thing going on) or represent fall as a bit less gloomy.

And the last stanza…it makes sense, yes, but to me at least, it’s still very sudden and in your face. It reminds me of that famous “Footprints in the Sand” poem. Now if that’s what you’re going for, then by all means go for it. Nobody can tell you how you should or shouldn’t write your poem, otherwise it wouldn’t be yours. I’m just saying that it seems a bit abrupt and heavy handed for my taste.

And as for embellishment, I guess I’m not entirely sure what they meant either. For full context, I sent them a poem about kids playing hide and seek in a park. The narrator hides in a leaf pile far from the park. I was very descriptive about the smell of corn dust that we can’t escape in the fall here in Iowa, the cracks of brown and gray light, how itchy the leaves were, etc. In the end, the other kids give up and the narrator basks in his victory for so long that he actually falls asleep in the leaf pile. When he wakes up and gets out of the leaf pile, it’s dark and his friends are all gone. Story Embers’ response was that it needed embellishment, rhyme, or meter. I added rhyme and resubmitted, but they asked for more embellishment. I think they wanted more metaphors, similes, fanciful language, etc., but I didn’t want that for my poem. I thought more flowery language (the kind I tend to see in Story Embers’ poetry) would weigh the poem down and take away from its child-like simplicity, so I pulled the submission.

If I were you, I’d dig through what Story Embers publishes for poetry and keep the word “embellishment” in mind. Think about how each poem is embellished. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to look at how many rhyme or have meter vs. how many are more free verse. If what you find seems to match the feel of your poem or what you’d like it to be, I’d say go for it. If not, maybe submit a different poem for the contest or take a look at other publications/contests for this poem. http://www.submittable.com has been a great resource for me.