The Official Writing Challenge
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Date
05/07/15
I sometimes wonder if Christ was speaking about the "wrath to come" due to the actions of those crucifying Him. He always worried about everyone else but Himself.

Nicely done, well written and certainly on topic!

God bless~
This is quite good. I could instantly picture the scene and it gave me a great sense of how Jesus may have felt on that long night. The tiny red ink I have is make sure your verbs match your nouns. It should be the taste lingers. By taking out the modifier 'of tears,' it's easier to see the taste is singular and not plural. That's a teensy thing though and doesn't affect the power of your beautiful words. I enjoyed this from beginning to end,
Powerfully written and beautifully descriptive. I would perhaps change the wording of the line, “Father, is there no one else to take my place?” suggests Jesus is calling for a substitute of sorts, which was certainly not the case.
05/11/15
Oh wow, this is powerful and wonderfully done. Great job!
05/13/15
The strength of this poem is its imagery--using details like the "mossy floor" and "salty tears" helps the reader to easily envision and to vicariously experience this moment of agony.

I'd like to suggest that you work on meter a bit. Poems with a quatrain structure and a rhyming pattern such as this one typically are more regular in metric pattern. There should be a consistent pattern in each stanza of number of syllables per line, and of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, when I count the number of syllables in the lines of the first stanza, I get 10, 7, 11, 11. But the lines of the second stanza have 11, 14, 11, 15 syllables. The other stanzas, likewise, have different numbers of syllables. These should be more consistent.

Then there's the issue of stressed and unstressed syllables--in order to give your poem better flow, those should have a pattern as well. If you go to the FaithWriters forums, I have a few lessons in meter under "Jan's Writing Lessons." I recommend that you check those out for a more detailed look at using meter effectively in poetry.

Your use of repetition (Into the Garden...) at the beginning of each pair of stanzas is very effective, and gives your poem a lovely unity.