Perhaps you’re a poet and don’t know it! Even if not, you should know you can have a lot of fun with words. Individually, they are pictures, colours and movements, and together they can create moods, feelings and messages. Even a few words can evoke memories and emotions. Take for example, an haiku. This is a non-rhyming poem (with a Japanese origin) comprised of only 3 lines and 17 syllables: Line1 has 2 syllables, Line 2 has 10 and Line 3 has 5. Let’s write an haiku.
The first and only ingredients are words. I am suggesting we write an haiku about a feather, so we need as many words as we can think of related to the topic: feather, frond, bird, soft, gentle, strong, beat, wing, fly, flight, soar, glide, colour, wind, air, harmony, etc.
The first line (2 syllables) is already chosen – feather. The third needs words to make 5 syllables, so perhaps in strong harmony The second needs words which together make up 10 syllables, so perhaps: gentle alone, but together we soar. So the whole haiku becomes: Feather// gentle alone, but together we soar// in strong harmony. Obviously, there are lots of other ways in which these words could be put together, and different words could be used. It’s a bit like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw – and equally satisfying. And notice the underlying message that has come through when the words are together in the haiku.
And now longer poems. The process can be much the same – collecting together words around a subject and allocating them to lines. Much poetry is written with lines of different length, there are no rules apart from creating phrases that flow easily and by using words that fit well together. What about rhyming?, you say. Identify words which rhyme when you have made your word collection and before stringing them together in sentences. So, using the same topic as before, we could have: feather/together, fly/high, flight/night, soar/more, glide/ride, air/share and so on. And when you run out of ideas, there are rhyming dictionaries!
The same process can be used to write lyrics for songs, which you will want to sing after reading the previous blogs (It’s time to sing, etc)!
Renaissance not Retirement 