To and fro, there and back I love a rocking chair Floor and chair creak and crack As back and forth I tear Back and forth hard I go I like to rock with flare Recurved tips stem the flow Making mishaps so rare I can rock fast enough To stir surrounding air Long enough, plenty rough To make a carpet bare Mom rocked me on her knee And yet she would declare Mark my word, wait and see His rocking all will wear I rocked babes fast asleep Secure in arms that bear No crying, not a peep Disturb babe, don’t you dare Rocking is relaxing Relieves the mind of care Time for intense praying Turns darkness into fair Some prefer a TV Recliner in man lair Me, a rocker you see Where I can grunt and stare Write a poem rocking Eat a bowl of soup there Some essay concocting Or read the Word and prayer Worries come a-knocking Decisions like sun’s glare Before considering To rocker I repair When red flags go flying As false ideas blare Search for truth while rocking And find where it does err Slow, easy, day is done Sort thoughts as combing hair Hard, easy, sorrow, fun Like runners are a pair
I decided that I wanted to write a poem that was on a different subject than my usual several favorites. I had come across Robert Louis Stevenson’s
“The Swing”, which I quite like. And I like swings very much, too, but most of
my motion while sitting pivots about a rocking chair. Here is how I write a poem.
Firstly, an idea for a poem comes to me, as reading “The Swing” had provided in this case,
or the first line or two of a poem rolls off my mind as I am considering an
idea. This first line or two or the first verse form the basis for the challenge
(perhaps game is a better word) that I begin. I constrain myself to writing
the rest of the poem with same rhyme scheme (number of syllables per line) at the very least. Frequently I use the same sound ending for the same lines in each verse, as in this poem. Sometimes I even constrain myself to the same tenor of the lines in each verse. For example, the following verse illustrates this idea:
Each new day God provides our need He our bodies and spirits feed Sometimes it feels like we are starved It is then we are apt to plead
Lines 1 and 2 in this poem either communicate a blessing or command of God or a demand placed on our lives. Line 3 in each verse of the poem conveys a doubt or other faith struggle followed in line 4 by the solution or provision God gives. I know that my self-placed constraints are not necessary but it is part of the challenge that keeps wanting to write poetry, that plus a real strong feel that poetry should rhyme. A humorous side note to this poem is that I had written seven verses minus one line without much difficulty, but the last line would just not yield itself. So I did an exercise I generally like to avoid, partly because it seems like cheating in the game. I wrote out all of the words ending in the “-are” sound that I could think of. At this point I thought, “Wow, all of those expressive terms and I’m not using them.” That’s when the poem ballooned into eleven verses. Oh, there is one other constraining “rule” I place upon myself that is a higher priority than the rest. The lines must tell the truth. Certainly I mean philosophically, but also I mean personally. For example, my mom did rock me on her knee, and though I am not quoting what she said about my rocking wearing on people, she did comment many times about how I wore her out watching me and I how could wear out a rocking chair. So the crazy thing about you reading this poem, if you understood all that it says, is that you know more about me than many people that I have spent years around.
CreatorWorship 