Day Eighteen #Na/GloPoWriMo

Day 18 Prompt:

Finally, here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). When I was growing up, there was a book of poems in my house (I believe it was The Best Loved Poems of the American People) that was heavy on long, maudlin, narrative poems with lots and lots of rhyme – the sort of verse that used to be parodied on Bulwinkle’s Corner. As the twentieth century rolled in, poems like this were relegated to the status of stuff-schoolkids-were-forced-to-memorize, and they plummeted even further into our cultural memory-hole as learning poems by heart fell out of educational currency. But while some work in this style is extremely cringeworthy (I’m looking at you, “Bingen on the Rhine”), they can also be very fun to read. Take, for example, Sadakichi Hartmann’s “The Pirate,”  or Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.” The action is dramatic, there’s lots of emotions, and the imagery is striking.

Today, we don’t challenge you to write all of a long, dramatic, narrative poem, but we invite you to try your hand at writing a poem that could be a section or piece of one. Include rhyme, include unlikely and dramatic scenes (maybe a poem about a bank robbery! Or an avalanche! Or Roman gladiators! Or an enormous ball held by mermaids, where there is an undercurrent (hee) of palace intrigue!) Basically, a poem with the plot of an opera (evil twins! Egyptian tombs! Star-crossed lovers! Tigers for no apparent reason!)

Happy writing!

Of glasses, mermaids and tigers

 

A pair of glasses, once decided to play a trick or two

While on the page, aka screen, letters trembled askew

the one who wore said glasses thought she knew

how to poetry lines in a couplet, even three in a haiku

 

The pair went marching over the moon to a distant shore

where musceley mermaids, high on protein, pulled weights

under the watchful gaze of tigers who wore

sweat bands and addressed each other as mate

 

It was a land like no other,

this land the glasses discovered

far beyond the fogged-up smother

of the never-ending April—that covered

the one who wore them with a strange malaise

she sat like Tutankhamun, unmoved, except

in a mood, in a chair with that away-with-the-fairies gaze

till appeared on her screen---the Queen’s summons, then she leapt

 

to catch the drift, the muse, a thought too flimsy

to crack the day’s prompt—(optional, as always), am of eight

the ploy worked every time and tickled her whimsey

while she blanked and balked, her ego refused to let go of the bait

 

her glasses could bear no more her daily dose of Blah! Blah! Blah!

they hid under a mermaid’s tail but they’d like the world to know

if it were up to them, they’d be rather dancing the Mardi Gras

and whatever comes to the page today is all her, they accept no

blame.