These Golden Years

Written in response to the following challenges:

1. Debbie’s One Word Sunday: Golden
2. Amanda’s A and I Poetry Challenge: Oct 2018

Feature Photo: Taken at the Bandstand, Singapore Botanic Gardens, surrounded by a grove of Raintrees with yellow leaves, commonly called the Golden Rain Tree.

Season of Travail: A and I Poetry Challenge

Mulling over metre & rhyme (iambic pentametre, feminine endings, sprung rhythms), good & bad rhymes (is there such a thing?) & the humorous nuggets of wisdom found in Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled has kept me suitably occupied these past weeks. The exercises found here have brought me back to the basics of poetry creation which have been at the same time enlightening and exhausting.

Refashioning Rules

As I ran down Orchard Road this morning, I mulled over Debbie’s OneWordSunday prompt, Rules.  I have, at the behest of Older Daughter who is my consultant in all things poetic, started reading & working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. Reacquainting myself with metre & rhyme will hopefully give me more control; if I want to play outside the box, it would be good to first get to know the box.

Heart of the Matter

Poem note: a somonka is essentially 2 tankas on written on the theme of Love.

Submitted in response to Amanda & Ineke’s A&I Poetry Challenge, Aug 2018 to write a Heart poem.

This is one of my favourite pieces of music, and I thought of it as I reread the poem. It is usually soloed by a violin; the cello gives it an interesting texture. Enjoy!

Feature Photo taken on 30 June 2018 at Benchaswari Park, Bangkok.

 

Song of Celebration

Voice of the Sublime

In this month’s entry for the A and I Poetry Challenge to write a short 5-line poem, I thought I would try the version of a cinquain as used by Adelaide Crapsey, an early twentieth-century poet. Her form had 22 syllables distributed among the five lines in a 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2 pattern. Her poems share a similarity with the Japanese tanka, another five-line form & another favourite of mine, in their focus on imagery and the natural world.

Through the glass darkly: A and I Poetry Challenge May 2018

Notes: