Two Poems

I’m doing the November Poem a Day challenge again, which is always a good opportunity to replenish my stock of poems, if nothing else. Today, I’m bringing you two I wrote this week. Both are very short, and both are testing out new styles. (For anyone doing the Poetry Pub challenge as well, I’m publishing them in reverse order for layout reasons.)

Dream, Little Baby

Originally written November 3, 2022

The first is to the prompt “parallel.” Rather than a theme, I immediately thought of a ketek, a style of poem featured in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, which I finished this week. It’s a very symmetrical poetry style, with strict rules that I struggle to explain and probably messed up; basically, there are five distinct phrases and the root words must mirror each other, front to back. I wrote this one in honor of my boss’s in-progress adoption of a newborn.

Dream,
little baby,
in your parents’ loving arms.
Love parents—yours!
In babies, little dreams.

Into the Water

Originally written November 2, 2022

I committed the sacrilege of destroying a book for this one. In my defense, my dog had already destroyed the cover, and it wasn’t a very good book in the first place. This one is my first attempt at a blackout poem, which is what it looks like. The prompt was currents; I thought about using a scene from Wind in the Willows but definitely didn’t want to destroy my copy and also didn’t want to just photoshop out the words. So I decided to use this story about a drowned maiden instead. It’s more water than currents, but whatever.