Rhyming

Except not rhyming much, ’cause I’m bad at it. We’ve been having exercises for Contemporary Poetry over the last couple of months, and they’ve mostly been interesting and inspiring (a love poem or an anti-love poem; a response to another poem; an elegy…) but the one I couldn’t quite get a handle on was the formal poem (in a particular form, sonnet, etc.).

I don’t like form, really. Same with rhyme: Knowing you’ve got to end the line with a very select word tends to limit, not inspire me. Having to include a rhyme changes the line, and the rest of the poem, and not always for the better.

Anyway. Here’s a couple of poems. The first is one of my Elegy Poems; the second was borne out of… well, reCAPTCHA, to be honest. You know those word-verification boxes you have to complete when registering for websites? Well, reCAPTCHA is a particularly useful one, in that the words it uses are culled from the British Library–so you get these highly inspiring pairings of random words, most of which sound rather poetical: For instance, ‘The Normalcy’, ‘Syndrome Healer’, ‘Hypes Associated’, ‘Was Forbode’ and ‘Skidding Sun’, used below.

Elegy

[8^th March, 2010]

I was there when you coughed

And threw the lychee into the bin,

Because it was bitter. You said it tasted like hospitals,

As if you went around licking the walls. You said you’d never be caught dead

In a hospital. Even a clean one.

You passed your driving test on the third go.

You got a car from Harry, who’d saved. York was nice, smelled like dusk

You laughed when you saw the cartoon he drew of you, because the nose was too big.

I cried when you started seeing Harry,

And you thought I didn’t like him, because I turned my nose up.

He passed the test on the third go. Nobody’s perfect,

Even the good ones.

He was the one who found you, wasn’t he? Wedged against the wall.

They broke your ribs trying to bring you around, sticking dirty bone into your flesh.

They threw your heart away, because it was bitter,

Because I wasn’t there.

Skidding Sun

[5^th March, 2010]

Dappled like glaze on cold winter cherries,

The spray of the sun on mid-morning ferries;

Slivers slipping between the soft silver sheen

Of restless ivy leaves wriggling in green.

The skidding sun waves off the nighttime for day

And slopes from the sky, a schoolboy gone astray;

His bright-shining face turning to gloom,

A daffodil forgotten how to bloom.

The austere ochre lays its hand

To the scudding puff-cheeked clouds that band,

Close-knit and guardedly,

Under the branch of the sky, that tree

Of overarching weight that raises

A perch for the sun come skidding and blazing

From the curve of the earth to hang itself tall

Above the gardens that grow in the fall;

With crisp topaz leaves that scatter and shake

And swim to the ground to consort with the rake.