Higher Still

[ellajam]

Hi, Jared, welcome to the Pen. You've done a nice job of sticking to a consistant meter and rhyme scheme. Now you need to look at it and identify where you have sacrificed natural language and plain sense for the sake of it. Take a look at some notes for S1.

We come as a babe 
and start this stage. What stage? If it's a stage of life, which one? If it's a theater stage, we enter, not start.
Our families do we love. "Do" is just unnatural, sticks out as added only for meter's sake. We would normally say We love our families, this is an inversion, twisted for the rhyme.
All we know
is we must grow,
and hope for things above. Above? Above what?

As a child
our hope runs wild,
we dream of simple things.
Run and play,
and laugh all day,
and even having wings. I can't resist , substituting "imagine" for "and even" would have this make more sense.

Up we grow
and hope is sown
of soaring through the air.
Mountain peaks,
and oceans deep,
the places which we dare.

The last frontier.
It's far from near.
We hope to live on Mars.
Still, we stare
when we get there
and reach up for the stars.

When death calls
and our health falls,
to higher hopes we hold.
A city bright,
our souls made white,
where all is made of gold.

Try going through your poem and picking out the spots with similar problems. Good poetry takes practice, I hope you'll work on this one and post an edit.