One more...

I couldn't resist...

Poetry writing, an arduous task
Of mind-numbing phrasing and forcing of rhyme.
It will strain and bring pain to one’s overworked brain,
And most certainly cause mental illness in time.

Poetic Complaints

Yes, it's been an interesting week. I've been back in the poetry-writing saddle at work, trying to compose simple Bible-story poems for the children's curriculum I'm editing (www.generationsofgrace.com). On top of that, I've been reading Tennyson's Idylls of the King (at home, not at work!). The result is that I find myself once again very aware of meter...even thinking in it. Oy!

It's amazing what 2:30 does to the brain...or at least to my brain. In honor of that mind-numbing hour, two days ago I penned (um, "keyed"?) a little unrhymed iambic pentameter (a.k.a. "blank verse").

"2:30 p.m."

Disordered binders jut from crowded shelves
Above my desk, which hosts more of the same.
Each full of grammar and of spelling more
Disordered than the binders that they fill.
The bleak fluorescent lighting overhead
Gives off a dreary hum and dulls my brain.
I eye my coffee mug with some distaste--
It's cold--and, sighing, go back to my work,
Red pen in hand. It's days like this I think
A long vacation's really overdue.

And then yesterday I wrote this one, in honor (and I use that word loosely) of the 350-page dissertation that I'm editing as a side job right now. It's sort of taken over my life. Ugh.

"Hindsight"

If I'd known what it meant when I took on this huge dissertation,
If I'd looked in the future and seen my despair and frustration
And had known that one dollar per page would be scant compensation
For the toil and fatigue and "When will it be done?!" desperation
And had seen that my fate would be mental deterioration,
I can tell you this now: I'd at LEAST have expressed hesitation.
(But perhaps this is good for my ongoing sanctification?)

Sigh...if only the "real" poems, the ones for work, came out of my brain so extemporaneously. Oh, well. Maybe next week I'll compose some, um, positive, non-complaining lines.

Long Live the Wilderness...

Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of my favorite poets, for numerous reasons, not the least of which is his amazingly creative use of language--and his ability to coin new words/phrases to express sights, sounds, etc. This poem, called "Inversnaid" (Inversnaid is a waterfall, I think in Ireland), is one of my recent favorites. First, it's an excellent example of Hopkins's incredible language skills. And, second, I love the image he paints here...probably because I'm a nature girl. Whenever I read this poem, I feel like I'm out on a hike, taking in the sight and smell and sound of this tumbling, wild, wet stream. : )

"Inversnaid"

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wilderness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wilderness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.