#NaPoWriMo Day 9: A Rhyme Does Not A Poem Make.

‘Til the age of thirteen,
Inquisitive and keen,
I always thought a poem needs to rhyme–
Yes, every single time.
Fifteen,
Maybe give or take,
While exploring art and poetry, and everything in between,
I realized, a rhyme does not a poem make. 

What, then, makes it poetry?
Pray tell, what could be the secret recipe?

Well, I’ve heard you need a soul,
For starters, but that’s not really all,
A heart that feels more than it could take,
And a mind forever wide awake,
But also,
Several torn pages, and pens run dry,
And ideas discarded, all for a poem
That you eventually didn’t write.

Then it sits shunned, incomplete
For years and years, until you accept bitter defeat.

But victory lies
Not in the ways you improvise,
Nor when finally find
The perfect near–rhyme,
Nor when you disguise
A brilliant metaphor or simile–
It lies
In your wits, and your soul, because that’s poetry!

It’s infuriating and annoying in ways you can’t explain,
But the cost of a poem is pain.

The beauty of it all
Lies cleverly hidden like the sound of your heartbeat,
Audible only to you, a secret so small–
It’s right there but discreet.
In verses that flow free,
Woven into alliteration, woven into anaphora–
For once, fancy yourself a poet sat under a tree,
Searching for inspiration amidst the boredom.

Pick up a pen, for goodness sake!
Come find out what it takes.

For writing poetry,
Is to get your hands bloody,
And rip your heart and mind to shreds,
To find a part of you that’s not yet dead.
And to try not to loathe
Everything you’ve ever written before;
It’s only a part of your soul,
And there’s so much more for you to explore.

So, if a rhyme is what you think it takes,
You’re wrong, for a rhyme does not a poem make. 

~© Shubhangi Srinivasan.

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Today’s prompt via napowrimo.net is to write a poem with your usual rhyming but without following an actual meter or adhering to the same length of lines. They said we’d get bonus points if we could reference a specific sound in the poem, and I readily took that challenge.

I know it’s a little late for me to be posting the poem for the day. But when I saw the prompt, I knew it was going to be tricky. And, even though I had an extremely long day at work, I’ve been writing this poem in bits and pieces all day. I knew I wanted the title to be a little ironic to the prompt and the poem itself. So I decided to go ahead with ‘A Rhyme Does Not A Poem Make’, without even thinking what I was going to write about, except for maybe the last two lines of the poem. And of course, the lines in the poem rhyme in the way the prompt suggests.

People think anything that rhymes is considered poetry. They might be joking. But poems are an extension of a person’s soul. If you’ve read enough poems, you wonder if there is more to them than just words. Songs begin to make more sense to you. You find a rhythm to almost everything around you. You find beauty in places you never could’ve imagined before. Being exposed to poetry, in a way, is actually a great way to enrich your soul. It’s not just about romanticizing life either. It gives you a whole new perspective and forces you to think of things in ways you would have never done before– say, comparing life to kneading dough, for example (which was the poem I wrote yesterday).

So many people argue that poetry really isn’t their thing because they don’t seem to get it. But I think most people think they don’t ‘get it’ because they’re unwilling to look past the surface. This is true for all forms of art. Like maybe a painting in a museum that looks completely different after layers of yellowing varnish and twenty different restorations, or a movie that seems to have a new revelation every time you rewatch it, or a song that you never really bothered to pay attention to. Details are everywhere, and details are what make life legendary. You don’t ‘get it’ unless you want to look deeper and learn to read between the lines. And it only comes with exposure and practice, and most importantly, a willingness to dive deeper.

That’s what poetry is all about. Not just the rhymes. Maybe that’s what made me fall in love with it, and maybe this is why, even after a year of not writing anything, it still comes naturally to me.

See you tomorrow with more poetry and food for thought, then?

Yours truly,
The Shubhster.

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This has been day 9 of 30!
See you tomorrow?
Cheerio! Xx

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Featured Image by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash