Since 2010, inspired by National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I’ve had a project of writing fourteen 14-line stanzas each November. Mistakenly believing my favourite stanza form was a sonnet, I called this project LoSoRhyMo – Local Sonnet Rhyming Month. It turns out that my form isn’t a sonnet but an Onegin stanza, but I’m keeping the label anyhow.
If you want to read past Novembers’ verses you can click on the LoSoRhyMo tag at the bottom of this blog post. Or you could go to my Publications page and buy one of the four little books made up from these and others of my adventures in verse.
Here goes for November 2020, a fresh start:
Verse 1: Unprecedented again You can only be unprecedented once (Michelle Goldman, Asthma Australia, on ABC News, 31 October 2020) A cataclysmic bushfire season should be no surprise next time. We've raked the ashes, learned the lessons, know just how to lift our game. Unprecedented 2020 – fire, flood, plague and Rio Tinto – warns us that we won't be spared in days to come. Best be prepared! Yet here's our precedented morning – juice and coffee, jam and toast the fifteen-thousandth time at least. Each microsecond freshly dawning, despite our habit-blinkered view, is absolutely, freshly new.