It’s hard to open a newspaper, turn on a TV, or log on to the Internet without noticing America is as politically polarized now as it’s been in a long time. For at least a decade more than half the country, it seems, stridently dislikes the president, regardless of who he (or perhaps someday, she) is. Wouldn’t it be great to take a break from the vitriol, contempt, antipathy, ill will, and outright hatred that is poisoning political discourse these days?
Thank goodness for April, which is National Poetry Month. What better excuse is there to take a break from all this corrosive partisan acrimony?
The beauty of a festive literary jubilee like NPM is there are no limits to what enjoyers of this unique art form can choose to celebrate. There’s sufficient room beneath the poetry tent for acrostic aficionados, blank verse buffs, couplet connoisseurs, dramatic monologue devotees, elegy enthusiasts, haiku hounds, limerick lovers, and even quatrain zealots.
At the risk of sounding like a shameless self-promoter, I may have a bit of a gift for doggerel. In fact, I’ve been told I’m a poet who doesn’t even know it.
With that in mind I thought I’d try my hand at bringing joy and peace to a divided populace through original, politics-free poetry.
A limerick is a kind of humorous verse of five lines, in which the first, second, and fifth lines rhyme with each other, and the third and fourth lines, which are shorter, form a rhymed couplet. There is also one other rule regarding this type of doggerel: if a poet intends to have his or her work appear in a decent publication he or she cannot under any circumstances end a line with the word “Nantucket.”
Here’s what I came up with:
A wealthy New Yorker named Trump
Claimed a rival’s wife looked like a frump
Ted Cruz hemmed and he hawed
But Trump merely guffawed
“Lyin’ Ted…what a sad little chump!”
Haiku is a major form of Japanese verse that’s written in 17 syllables. It’s divided into three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and is supposed to employ highly evocative allusions and comparisons, often on the subject of nature or one of the seasons. It’s a fun one for novice poets like me to try, and remarkably easy if you ignore the part about highly evocative allusions and referring to nature or one of the seasons.
Vladimir Putin
He’s Edgar Bergen to Trump’s
Charlie McCarthy
Who really wants a
President that, grabs women
By their err, umm,….cat?
Terrific health care!
Lower taxes! New great wall!
Uh oh. Pants aflame!
A rhyming couplet is defined as two lines of verse that rhyme that can form a unit alone:
A self-proclaimed business genius that we know
Somehow lost money…while running a casino!
or can function as part of a longer poem:
Trumpty Dumpty’s building a wall
And he’ll make Mexico pay for it all!
He’s gambling Americans aren’t very bright
And sadly, when it comes to his fans he is right
No celebration of poetry would be complete without a nod to the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare. Here’s a 14-line Shakespearean sonnet that came to me after a recent walk through the woods observing the sylvan loveliness:
A wealthy purveyor of snake oil
And longtime New York City resident
Decided on a lark that he might want to toil
As America’s 45th president
His qualifications seemed terribly few
His one long suit seemed to be arrogance
But he cobbled together a devious crew
Composed mainly of pliable sycophants
Baiting his opponents, he’d call them all names
Since for the White House they too were vying
But he smeared one and all with his spurious claims
It sure helped that he doesn’t mind lying
In charge now, incompetent, and likely quite mad
He’s thin-skinned and impulsive, or as he would tweet, “Sad!”
Hmmm. Bringing about political healing with verse is tougher than I thought.
Maybe I should take on a new challenge, like finding rhymes for “orange” or “month.”
But sadly so far I’ve got nothing at all, and I’ve even asked my daughter and my thonth.
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