Category Archives: LoSoRhyMo

November verse 2

Posted on 5 Nov 2023 | 8 comments

For today’s verse, I listened for iambic tetrameters while watching TV last night. The first one I heard would be my first line, and the next would be my last. Old People’s Home for Teenagers gave me ‘I read so much stuff in the papers’ and a news item about Gaza yielded, ‘The last thing anybody wants.’ All I had to do was write 12 rhyming lines to go between them. I’m a bit alarmed at what the process dredged up from my mind:

2. The papers
I read so much stuff in the papers.
Who can tell what’s fake or true 
or if it matters? Story shapers
bang the drum for red or blue –
the way Big 'bacco did for smokers –
talk to win, play hocus-focus.
'Save the dolphins,' Dutton cries
transparently. The planet fries
but he's PM, or so he's planning.
Once I thought God would provide,
but God is now claimed by the side
of short-term greed. It's time for fanning 
flames of truth, wake from this trance:
the last thing anybody wants

8 Comments

Posted in LoSoRhyMo

Tagged

November verse 1, 2023

Posted on 2 Nov 2023 | 2 comments

It’s the second day of November and I have to get to writing verse. This is my 14th year of taking on the challenge to write 14 14-line poems in November, in what I’ve called LoSoRhyMo – Local Sonnet Writing Month – before I learned that my favoured verse form is not a sonnet, but an Onegin stanza. You can browse 20 screens of past efforts here, or you could even buy one of the five little books I’ve made out of them – here.

Today I’m taking as my starting point Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens’ discussion of the recent referendum result on The Minefield, though I’ve only listened to their opening salvoes, so my verse doesn’t actually engage with their thinking.

Here goes, with a bag of mixed metaphors and apologies for the Kipling reference:

November verse 1: Yes and no
Yes means yes, and No means something
else, just not the offered thing.
True, Yes is narrow, No's a thumping
choir too many voices sing, 
to drown out Yes's one voice, crowing,
snarling, weeping croc tears, lowing 
pride-like, herd-like, chewing cud
of victory, and tasting  blood.
But Yes can watch its hopes lie broken,
stoop, and build with worn-out tools
a new flame as the old one cools.
Not just the Woke have now been woken:
gauntlet's run and gauntlet's thrown,
to be picked up. A seed is sown.

2 Comments

Posted in LoSoRhyMo

Tagged ,

November verse 14: Graduation

Posted on 30 Nov 2022 | Leave a comment

Here’s the last of this year’s November verses, uploaded 80 minutes before the midnight deadline:

November verse 14: Graduation
Today is preschool graduation, 
milestone for the almost-fives.
Oh, after long anticipation
3 pm at last arrives 
and soon the graduands are singing
(also jostling, waving, grinning).
One by one they shake the hand 
of Teacher looking mighty grand
and take from her a bag of goodies:
artwork they themselves have made, 
certificate (they've made the grade),
and popcorn. Then, unleash the foodies:
trays of watermelon, grapes and cake,
and cake, and cupcakes, and more cake.

Leave a comment

Posted in LoSoRhyMo

November verse 13: Hearing aids

Posted on 29 Nov 2022 | 3 comments

Today I parted with a lot of money. The least I can do is write a rhyme about the reason.

November verse 13: Today I got my hearing aids

They said that I was hard of hearing.
More like soft, the edges dull,
the high notes mostly disappearing,
sibilants all rendered null.
But soft or hard, that’s just pedantic:
friends were cross, sometimes frantic,
tired of shouting to be heard,
repeating every second word.
Today I got two electronic
gizmos, one in either ear,
enabling me at last to hear
what yesterday was ultrasonic.
People have stopped mumbling words
and all my streets are filled with birds.

3 Comments

Posted in LoSoRhyMo

November verse 12: On a dead goldfish

Posted on 28 Nov 2022 | 6 comments

Not as morbid as you might think:

November verse 12: On a dead goldfish
For Euan
Today we found our last fish floating
lifeless, limp, no longer gold,
a death so tiny, not worth noting.
True though, They shall grow not old.
Flight path fuel dump? Change of season?
Too much sun? Who knows the reason?
This is not Menindee Lakes
where millions died and my heart quakes.
Today I felt a tiny tremor,
rumble from a distant storm,
an inkling that some day the worm
will try my bones, from skull to femur.
May mine be one tiny death,
leave undisturbed the wide world's breath.

6 Comments

Posted in LoSoRhyMo

November Verse 11: In the sauna

Posted on 25 Nov 2022 | Leave a comment

Someone needs to write about the wonders of swimming-pool saunas in Sydney’s Inner West. While we’re waiting, here’s my 14 lines’ worth. 

November verse 10: In the sauna

Some days we sit and sweat in silence.
Others, it’s as if the heat
dissolves some barrier, gives licence.
Chat can flow and minds can meet,
perhaps with bonhomie and bluster,
pre-cooked jokes, a rant or just a
monologue on weed or booze,
or mild debates about the news.
Tattooed gym-boy, taxi driver,
yia-yia, rap star, tattooed youth,
an old guy with a missing tooth:
all these bodies, like Godiva
almost naked, shoot the breeze,
and no one’s sent to Coventry.

Leave a comment

Posted in LoSoRhyMo

November Verse 10: Pictures and words

Posted on 24 Nov 2022 | 2 comments

Today’s stanza draws on a passage from Middlemarch in which Ladislaw, whose hair is ‘not immoderately long’, argues the superiority of poetry over painting. The first two lines are almost a direct quote.

November verse 10: Pictures and words
Language gives a fuller image,
all the better as it's vague.
Paintings flaunt their frozen plumage,
stare insistent from the frame
in finished, silent imperfection.
Neither love nor harsh rejection
crease a portrait's botox brow.
No worm forgives the painted plough. 
Life as lived is full of noises
much diviner than what's seen
(or, on occasion, more obscene).
The air resounds with speaking voices:
one picture can delight your eyes, 
a thousand words can make you wise.

2 Comments

Posted in LoSoRhyMo

November Verse 9: Shouting at my phone

Posted on 20 Nov 2022 | 8 comments

I won’t name the podcast. I suppose if I had been listening with real interest I wouldn’t have got snagged on what is after all a common usage these days, but it was drilled into me in primary school that one lies down and lays the table, lay down and laid the table, and my mind evidently still replays the nuns’ rebukes from 1954.

November verse 9: Yelling at my phone
She said she just laid in the water. 
I shouted at my phone: Laid what?
The language changes and I ought to
take it in my strides – why not?
Give someone an intensive purpose.
Let him join an army corpus,
answer questions someone begs
and buy the dozens that are egg's.
Sneak peaks aren't fit to die on.
The world's just right for doggy-dogs
but still wrong for slow-boiling frogs.
The planet warms, we may be dying.
As we near that final night
at least let's try to spell it right.

In case any of the references are obscure:

  • line 4: the correct idiom is ‘take it in my stride’
  • line 5: ‘to all intents and purposes’ means something; ‘to all intensive purposes’ doesn’t
  • line 6: ‘Corps’ is pronounced to rhyme with ‘core’. And in my opinion ‘corp’, short for ‘corporation’, should be pronounced as written
  • line 7: ‘To beg the question’ does not mean the same as ‘to raise the question’. In classical logic, it happens when an argument’s premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it
  • line 8: Apostrophes aren’t necessary when an s is there to indicate more than one of something. (Apostrophes are probably necessary hardly anywhere, but that’s another argument)
  • line 9: It’s a sneak peek and a dog-eat-dog world
  • line 10: The analogy of a frog that won’t jump out of boiling water if it boils gradually may be instructive, but I’d like to know if there’s any evidence that frogs are that stupid

8 Comments

Posted in LoSoRhyMo

Tagged

November Verse 8: Graupel

Posted on 18 Nov 2022 | 8 comments

The weatherman on ABC News the other night spoke of graupel, a lovely word that was new to me. It almost does the impossible and rhymes with purple.

November verse 8: Graupel

The heavens opened, down came graupel,
baby hail. The storm soon passed
and downstairs' lawn shone green, white, purple –
jacaranda, ice and grass.
A rattling downpour, hints of thunder,
then this calm nine-minute wonder.
For a moment we knew grace,
La Niña showed her lovely face. 
Not so in Molong, Forbes, and Nowra.
There La Niña went to town
to rip and drench, to smash and drown,
then flashed her worst at poor Eugowra.
She's no god we must appease.
Code red: 1.5 degrees!

Added later: Photo taken from our kitchen window of our downstairs neighbours’ yard. The jacaranda blossoms don’t show up in this photo, but they were there.

Photo by Penny Ryan

8 Comments

Posted in LoSoRhyMo

Tagged

November Verse 7: Demo

Posted on 12 Nov 2022 | 1 comment

I was going to have a couple of days break from versifying, but yesterday morning demanded rhyme.

November verse 7: Demo

We met outside the bank this morning,
placards, microphone and drums,
to amplify the climate warning:
No more cash for coal, you bums. 
This movement’s male and white no longer:
cheerful, young, brown, female, stronger
than it’s ever been. Today,
though many heads were white and grey,
the ones from Asia and the oceans
led us, spoke of rising tides
and fossil-fuel based genocides,
derided short-term profit notions,
knew how to push the envelope
and temper urgency with hope.

The National Australia Bank, in spite of having a policy of not funding new fossil fuel ventures, is actually lending billions of dollars to Whitehaven Coal, which has no policy of cutting emissions and plans to mine vast amounts of coal for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile island nations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are in trouble. The Move Beyond Coal movement has just finished an Australia-wide Week of Action targeting the NAB.

1 Comment

Posted in LoSoRhyMo

Tagged