I trawled through today’s text messages looking for a string of nine syllables that would work as the first line of an Onegin stanza.
I found my string in a Tai Chi group chat on WhatsApp. The full sentence is, ‘This exercise is very useful for people with constipation and bloating.’ For my purposes, the first five words of that sentence took on a life of their own..
Verse 14. This exercise is very useful
This exercise is very useful –
wrestling English into rhyme.
It keeps my mind, if not quite youthful,
not washed up before its time.
This versing is a lot like fishing:
drop a line and sit there wishing
for a bite, a rhyme, a thought,
an image begging to be caught,
and when one comes, when you can feel it,
play the line, go where it goes
(but take a walk, ’cos heaven knows
it leads somewhere but won’t reveal it
easily). Each time I find
some shiny moment from my mind.
And that’s my 14 stanzas for this November!
Me fail? I fly! 