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?
I admire you for actually trying to avoid using the letter E! In my poem, I decided it was too difficult to actually avoid it, and instead I approached the problem in a roundabout way, and still used words with the letter, either with a strikethrough or with an underscore standing in for the letter. The poem naturally developed as a sort of commentary about the limits of the letter's absence. For everyone who actually wrote a poem without using E, I applaud you -- I know how frustrating it must have been.
ReplyDeleteI liked this poem and post; even though you sound salty about this assignment, the poem actually turned out really well. When you talk about nicks on a staff it makes me think of that tall guy in Pocahontas. And the references to the fourth made me think about that movie we watched in history...anyways. I think there was a a lot of depth in the second stanza and overall this was interesting and personally I think the poem makes sense.
ReplyDeleteYour poem is great! I did this prompt as well, and I agree with you, not being able to use words like "the" did get annoying from time to time, but you did a great job. I liked the complexity, the imagery, and your use of longer, more complex words. When I was writing my prompt, I wasn't as adventurous in my word choices and I kept everything simple.
ReplyDeleteNice job on not using "e"! I will say it was a little hard to follow, but overall I thought it was really cool and probably took you a lot of time!
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