Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Untitled slinky

At our first PTA meeting at our daughter's new
school, my wife gives me a little bit of a prod.
The dad in charge of the dad's maintenance muster roll,
Paul, gives me a firm handclasp and a welcoming smile.
While we talk, I notice details in the multipurpose space:
faces of celebrities drinking milk, the piano, the stage.
Age has made me able to enter a school by the front door
grace on my shoulders, but I flash back to third grade.
April we moved to a new school in Hawaii, a new place
all over. The school buildings were military barrack style.
God, I stared up at the windows that opened with a long pole
through group time and reading time and math squad,
poor new kid, trying to keep the tears in his head until two.

***

THE FORM:
Rhymes inform both the first (or second) word and last (or penultimate) word of each line. For the first half of the poem, the rhyme scheme is a-b, b-c, c-d... so that the last word of the line rhymes with the first word of the next line. The center line starts with a word that rhymes with the last word of the prior line and ends with a word the "a" rhyme. The poem then reverses the order of the rhyme c-d, b-c, a-b, so that the first word of each line rhymes with the last word of the following line. The rhyme scheme of this sample is

a-b
b-c
c-d
d-e
e-f
f-g
g-a
f-g
e-f
d-e
c-d
b-c
a-b

1 comment:

  1. nice...I do not know how you & Scooter manage these poetry math puzzles so well

    ReplyDelete