Every August, my wife and I enter about as much as humanly possible into the Carroll County Fair. I can’t say why we do it, must be something faulty in our wiring. We each spend considerable time throughout the year contemplating different categories we might be able to enter. The last couple of years (not counting the COVID-19 year of isolation), the fair has offered two writing categories in the adult education section. One is a short story of under a thousand words. That’s any easy one for me. As I discussed in a previous post, I enter a Flash Fiction contest every year, so I usually have at least two stories to choose from to enter.
The other category is a poem of no more than four stanzas. I’ve never written poetry, and while I certainly read plenty of it at college – you know the stuff – Shakespeare’s sonnets, Milton’s epic, a little T.S. Eliot, a few others that sleep latently in some neuropath of my mind – I never really fully grasped most poetry. I can tell you about it, sort of like I can tell you about politics, but truthfully, I don’t understand it.
Still, I wanted to challenge myself, so I entered the poetry category without having one in mind, and I have to admit that there is some masculine, pre-evolved part of me that thinks poetry and then thinks I have to write about flowers or sunrises or love. I know better, but that’s still where my mind goes first. It took a day or two to break my mind out of that trap.
The first thing I wanted was a structure. I knew if I could commit to some type of poem, I could focus on structure and then worry about content. I am a subscriber to Writer’s Digest and each issue they have a page called the “Poetic Aside” that introduces a form of poetry. One of the old issues I had demonstrated a form called a “Rime Couee.” Here’s the bullet point breakdown:
- Six-line stanzas.
- Eight syllables in lines one, two, four, and five.
- Six syllables in lines three and six.
- Rhyme scheme: aabccb. (For those that didn’t study poetry, that’s the end word rhyme scheme, so lines 1 and 2 would rhyme, lines 3 and 6 would rhyme, and lines 4 and 5 would rhyme).
Next was a topic. I decided I wanted to write a sci-fi poem. Something off the wall. I had few strains of ideas from various stories that I had started but never finished and I sort of mixed them into a poem soup. The two major ones being “The Wretches” which I conceived as breeds of humans mixed with animals engineered by scientists for various functions. The second was the standard post-apocalyptic world of “The Waste.” From there, I came up with a poem called the “The Waste.”
While I doubt I’ll ever become a serious poet, the value of writing poetry is that it forces the writer to be focused on word-choice, something that is important in prose, but can often get lost when writing longer pieces. So, I think I’ll keep trying poetry, at least writing one each year for the fair. (By the way, this one was awarded the blue ribbon, beating the one other poem that was entered.)
With no further ado, here is my one and (so far) only poem:
The Waste
Max chased the Wretches to the waste
Such beings bred from scientists’ haste
A blend of man and beast
Conjured in labs for tasks discrete
Controlling the brood proved a feat
Till peace time here did cease.
From corners and cages they flew
As bombs dropped at morning’s dew
Raging, frantic, incensed
A spirit of boldness soon grew
Freedom taught the Wretches life true
Bonds no longer made sense.
Enter our hero of pure stock
Max, a born leader of the flock
Determined, committed
To wrangling the Wretches in field
But the brood refused to yield
Could they be outwitted?
The waste, the devil surely carved
A place where all creatures soon starved
Cruel, careless creators
Cursing the brood to such sad fate
That man always held heaven’s gate
Unmasks God’s true traitors.
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