The Cerebral Mum

The 9th assignment from 30 poems in 30 days… A brief glossary of metre…

“Write a poem using a specific meter. The meter can be of your own choosing or even your own making, as long as you put a pattern into place.”

Sapphics of the Deep

Clams without teeth stopper their jaws and bind the
Currents; white flotillas of paper beach on
Tideless shores; I walk through convention, silenced,
Greeting the grey men.

Speaking nothing, language reduced by empty
Habit; sounds now mindless, unmade, like boats that
Drift in shallows, seeking no stormfront, sighting
No more the giants.

Leashed what once was swollen with Gods and Jung and
Darkness; thick, primordial waters made of
Words like squid, electric and phosphorescent
Colours in ink moved.

Never having worked with meter before (I don’t count bad sonnets) I chose, in my ignorance, to use sapphic meter. It had been my intention to publish just the one post tonight with all my “catch-up” poems and call it Bloody awful poetry… Instead, I am bloody proud of this and it gets to have a post all of it’s own.

Let me just say, Sapphics are hard.

Perhaps someone better-versed in scansion than me will find fault with what I have written. It is possibly imperfect. But I didn’t know what a trochee was before I started this and working with such an unnatural meter, in a language the meter was not intended for, I think I succeeded.

Not only that, but I have been frustrated by the simplicity of my previous poems and their lack of imagery. I used to write poetry in a very stream-of-consciousness way and it was dense with symbolism, not deliberately but because my mind thought in pictures.

Finally, I have written pictures with my words again.