Fourth will march on.
Growth, concord, constructions of glory,
Dilapidation, cataclysm, passing of nations,
All just additional nicks on a staff.
Soon mortal coil’s immortal grasp triumphs,
Usually inconspicuous and dim.
Fourth is, in fact, thoroughly nonchalant about its contracts;
It pays no mind to a trivial or significant affair.
If Fourth will not and cannot worry,
And nobody is watching,
Did it at any point actually occur?
John, light, and atoms say no.
Writing the poem without the letter “e” irritated me to no end; I couldn’t type “be”, “the”, “are”, “he”, etc. I ended up thinking of or Googling a replacement word every time I wanted to put in a word with “e” in it, which I’m doing now too, with the other letter I can’t put in. Either that, or I tried to reword everything. If not creative, it turned out to be effective. In the beginning, I even thought about making it rhyme, but that turned out to be too difficult.
For the idea of the poem, I’m not actually certain on how I came up with it. I kind of wrote it piece by piece (not in order) and then glued them all together. I threw in a metaphor or weird, hazy reference whenever I could, to the point where I don’t even know if the poem can be called coherent or not. I conclude my writing turned out fitly bleak, too. Poetry, right?
