Short poetry

If you’re anything like me… you love vivid imagery stored in writing. You find beauty in dip pens, ink, and old yellowed paper. You can make a poem out of that.

Oh, and you like songs based on lyrics. Especially Taylor Swift.

If you’re here, you probably love writing. You like making worlds out of your imagination. So I’m going to share something I learned in a windy December.

Auroras and sad prose

A quick Google search of this The Lakes lyric told me what proses are:

According to Google, proses are “written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure”. So basically, they’re ordinary english with no poetry whatsoever.

But sad prose? Well, I think I have an idea of what it means.

Once, I attended a writers’ workshop. A teacher told us about how you can write a whole story in jsut a sentence, and it changed my life.

Take this example:

FOR SALE
Wedding dress
never worn

You can look at it for a while. Okay, there’s a wedding dress. It’s for sale and was never worn. It can mean anything.

Then you ask, why? You can interpret that any way you want.

It’s not explicit after all, but in my opinion the answer to the why? is a tragedy. There are no right or wrong answers, but I saw this as a girl who was about to get married. Then her fiance left her… and then she was never wed.

Woah. That went deep. Other people thought the girl died. Others thought nothing of it and a guy just wants to sell a wedding dress on ebay.

But that changed my perspective. Let’s move on to another topic - one of my favourites!

Haikuuusss!

A classic Japanese poem with no rhymes and consists of three lines. The first line has 5 syllables, the second 7, and the last 5 again. And it’s the best type of poem in my opinion.

Poems are often descriptive and written in old english and whatnot. They consist of flowery metaphors and long hard words. But what I like about haikus are that they’re so simple and that’s the beauty of it.

Ignore the haikus in Percy Jackson; they’re not just about the syllables, but they’re about the nature of the poems.

Let’s see an example from the first result in Google.

“The Old Pond” by Matsuo Basho
an old silent pond
a frog jumps into the pond -
splash! silence again.

I’m too lazy to keep browsing, but I like this poem. It’s written in such simple words that anyone can understand it. And yet it’s simply beautiful.

The simplicity really takes you into the poems. It’s like a tranquil little scene. You’re surrounded by nature, as most haikus are set in.

Here’s another poem from a cool detailed article.

Untitled by Ryokan Taigu
in the autumn wind
standing alone
a shadow

By now you probably get the idea. Some of them have verbs and simple adjectives, but I like how they use just a noun in a single line.

Here’s one I wrote on the spot:

“Morning Rain” by yours truly
the patter of rain
teardrops on my windowsill
a drizzly morning

I’m one of those people who love rain and the smell of rain… but not puddles and mud. But rain definitely takes about 10% of all my poetry.

Simple words

You don’t need to know similies and metaphors and whatnot to make your poetry and writing beautiful. If you have a vivid mind’s eye and you can translate it into effective words, you can write beautiful things.

I mean, it’s usually the plain words that make me cry my eyeballs out. By saying plainly that my favourite character is dead - ouch, that’s like a dagger to the chest.

I think you should try writing these yourself! Thanks for reading <3.