My pup is sitting on top of my knapsack, clearly miffed that she can’t sit on the keyboard of my Macbook Pro. I am here typing up my latest poetical offerings from my weekly sojourn to Barnes & Noble. I am starting to really enjoy my time spent there, reading and writing poetry. Today’s poems included syllabic verse, and two poetical forms, the terza rima and the quatrain.
Syllabic verse, most famous of which is the haiku, is poetry based on number of syllables per line as opposed to metrical feet or stresses or what have you. I wrote two syllabic verse poems, one on rain, the other on hygiene, topics as suggested by my muse, Stephen Fry of The Ode Less Traveled. The first poem is written with alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables. You can work out for yourself the syllab count of the second poem.
Rain
Gently falling from the sky
staining the dry ground
with dripping drops of moisture
the clouds seem to cry
But to weep or not to weep
the rain is welcome
farmers rejoice to see water
around their crops seep
Hygiene
It starts with
a gentle scrubbing of
me
from head to toe
teeth, hair, skin, nails
brush’d
now I’m clean enough for
society.
External
cleanliness is only
part
of the story
how does one scrub the inner you
from filthy things?
start
not by drinking draino
it won’t work.
I amuse myself thusly. Anyway, I then went on to formal poetry, that is poems adhering to a form, the most famous of which is probably the sonnet. I played around with terza rima, a poetical form that alternates rhymes at the end of the lines in an ABA BCB CC pattern. My terza rima was written in iambic pentameter on the subject of World War Two.
Untitled
The greatest generation: historically
they fought and died to save the world from sin.
The wars, once won, they danced euphorically.
We shudder, thinking what might have been
if Germany had won the war of wars.
Might we now march to songs of Hitler’s din?
But all our praise to women, men, the corps
who fought and died. To them we raise a chorus.
Not very good, perhaps, but it adheres to the form and it rhymes, at least partly. Lastly I wrote two quatrains, a poem with a rhyme scheme of ABAB in any number of stanzas, also in iambic pentameter.
This Town
Just one Post Office, a single stop light
banks: three, churches: four, a people: one.
Though old and worn our town is full and bright;
it is the best old town we love under the sun.
Poesy
A poem is hard to write in meter and rhyme
to sort the accented syllabs and foots
it takes much thought and lots and lots of time
the page gets covered in pencil soot
As the poet writes and carefully rewrites the lines
when one, like gold, is writ it is like loot
pulled from vault or chest, a most heinous crime
of literary kind, but hark! the poem takes root!
Again, not very good, but that isn’t the point at the moment. The point is to adhere to form and that I have done. By the way, as I have used it twice now, syllab is my non-word word for syllable. I always thought it could use a shortened form. And the title for this post, “adazzle” means “glitteringly bright” and was a new word that I came across in my reading today. I learned it and now I share it with you.
a simple man 