Behind the Blog 18: Poetry

Behind The Blog is a meme to help bloggers connect their life and interests to the content showcased on their blog. The co-hosts Faye Kathe and Melissa will provide a different topic, idea, or question every week that bloggers can relate to themselves and the books, films, or media they find interesting!

Since this week is free choice week for Behind the Blog I decided that I would share some of my own poetry. I used to write poetry a lot more often than I do now. I don't think I've written a poem in a few years, actually. 

Both of the poems that I'm going to share with you are poems that were published in my high school's literary magazine in  2002, which was my junior year. I was taking creative writing as an elective that year and as part of the class it was our job to put together the literary magazine in addition to our assignments. I don't think that we were actually required to submit any of our work to the magazine as part of our grade, but we were encouraged to. Anyone from the school was allowed to submit poems or short stories but the majority of the work came from our class.

I managed to be brave enough to put two of my poems on display then, so I figured I might as well share them now. 

One was a poem that I originally wrote when I was 12. When I wrote it then, our teacher simply put a transparency of a picture up on the overhead and said write whatever you want about this picture. It was a decent poem even for a 12 year old (I still have the original version) but for this class I reworked it and cleaned up the language a little bit. It's called Beautiful, Horrible Dream.

Beautiful Horrible Dream

The wind shrieks as loudly as my terrified screams.

The mist hangs, like the veil on a grieving widow.

The waves crash over my feet, like angry slaps from my mother's hand.

The sea roars, as angry as a charging bull.

I am helpless and horrified in my terrible dream.

The jagged mountains wait to devour my soul.

I see trees as twisted arms waiting to snatch me.

The rain pours down like the beating of war drums.

I taste the salty air swirling around me. 

I feel pain as I stumble on the stones beneath my feet

Why is this dream haunting me so?

I want to run, but stand mesmerized

By the beauty inside the horror.

There are ways that I want to change and improve upon that even now, but I left it alone.

This next one is a sonnet, that I originally wrote as an assignment for this class.

Untitled

As the dark blue waves roll along the beach,

Hand in hand we walk, quickly, quietly.

Not knowing exactly where we are going,

Thinking and talking, with the wind blowing.

Oblivious to the world around us, 

Only ones here, silence is in surplus.

Sun sets as day turns slowly into night.

The light grows dim, with stars shining so bright.

Soon we  must choose our own destinies.

I hope that you will always be with me.

IF you are not, then I can surely say,

I will miss you forever and always.

So now we both must be so brave, so bold,

And go on to see what the future holds.

I'll admit, that one is rough around the edges, because I had just learned the rhythm of sonnets and wasn't very good with it yet.

In addition to longer poems, I also like to do haiku from time to time, so I wanted to share with you all a cool site that lets you build your own haiku. It makes it really easy, because it gives you the first line of your haiku. Your first line is the last line of the haiku the person before you wrote. The website is haikuchain.com

Here's my haiku that I just completed as I was writing this post. 

Deliver his kiss

without breaking her sweet heart

sweet hearts are fragile.

So the person after me will have to start their haiku with "Sweet hearts are fragile" Pretty neat huh?

Do you write poetry? Have you ever had it published?

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