Category Archives: poems about teenage pregnancy

Check List for a Budding Poet

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Check List for a Budding Poet

If you want to be prolific,
better that you be specific,
and when you choose to state each fact,
try to make each word exact.
Don’t use time-worn words or wilted.
Avoid pretentious words or stilted.

Never try to force a rhyme.
Do not fail to take the time
to make your lines scan smoothly for,
uneven meter is a bore.
Words written for effect are hollow,
but where heart is, the head will follow.

So write your poetry from the heart.
Put your horse before the cart
and let it pull you up the hill.
Let your words express their will—
you following blindly, just to see
what the next line wants to be.

Let words of different shapes and sizes
furnish pleasure and surprises.
Make your poems resemble zoos
of striped okapis and kangaroos.
Delight yourself and then your reader.
Follow words, then be their leader

by whipping them in line and order,
shaping them within your border.
It never is too late to change
an errant line that’s out of range,
but editing is not what you
initially should seek to do.

Words give hearts tongues to share their pleasure
and their pain in equal measure.
Essayists and authors strive
to make their writings come alive.
They show us where their minds have been,
but poets put the music in.

 

For dVerse Poets “List Poem” Prompt

Anger (Anagram Poem)

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With my Open Studio to set up today, I don’t have time to wait for the Daily prompt, so instead I’m using a prompt suggested by Sam Rappaz. The Prompt: ‘Anagram poem‘. These poems are adopted from the word games that we find in newspapers. The rules are: End words must be derived from four or more letters in the title. Words which acquire four letters by the addition of “s” are not used. Only one form of a verb is used. (Thanks, Sam Rappaz. You can see her Anagram poem here.)

Just for the fun of it, I’m going to try to use the words Anagram Poem for the challenge, but instead of using those words as the title of my poem, I’m using a word derived from them:

Anger

All through our lives it lingers near.
It hovers close over her infant’s pram,
where his mother’s soothing words manage
to calm his cries of distressed rage.
Yet what he sows is left to her to reap.
His distress squelched may turn in her to anger
as at midnight, with the seventh remop
of the day, the angst supressed all day is allowed to range
unfettered, growing from a silent pang
to a depression best escaped from with a rope.

Who imagined this, that wild night after prom
when he first held her breast, a glowing pear,
and she, at last, met his questing grope
not with a “No” expressed clean off the page
of the pamphlet given by her gram;
but rather by a passion that rang,
on that one night, truer with every groan.
His muscled back, her throat, her golden mane.
Her naked thigh pressed to the gear.
For once, her lover given no cause to mope.

And for a day, a week, a month, that golden night remained a poem.
Until the time-worn ending added one stanza more.
Telling her grandma and her gramp.
That long journey up the nuptial ramp.
That fast trip from teenager to ma’am.
With lightning speed, from car seat to manger
and the clock watched, and his absence, and this overpowering midnight rage.