A Bit of Poetry

This Is Just To Say (An Exercise in Mimicry)

I did not do the work today

Yet I am sure

You would never know

Do you care?

I do not think

You will

I hung out with friends instead

Perhaps next time

You can

I really just tried to have fun with this exercise. It’s not very often that one is asked to turn in a poetry assignment that is based in part on someone else’s work. I found William Carlos Williams original to be fairly humorous, so I strived for the same thing. After reviewing what I had turned in, I decided to change it a little, because I thought that having contractions in the poem ruined the rhythm, and did not look too great in the formatting of the poem. I guess this could be considered a case where the superficiality won against substance. I have to say that I found it particularly funny that Dr. Jordan thought this poem was a cheeky reference to the assignment itself, but I do see how it could have be interpreted it that way. I am somewhat ambivalent about the ending, I went for something that could be seen as ambiguous, yet I do not feel as if I managed to pull it off completely. Basically, I wanted the reader to think “O hey, I can go hang out with my friends while you do the work next time,” while possibly meaning “Actually, next time I’m going to hang out with friends again, and you are going to do my work for me.” Did I pull it off or did it just fall flat on its face?

A Place Called Home (Short)

Sensations of peace flow in, around;

Pretentious faces no longer matter.

A Place Called Home (Long)

A place of peace – strong, yet tender

Enveloping all who seek comfort and warmth

All of it endures here, where

I can be myself

For all to see

In the long version of the poem, I tried to define what ‘home’ is for me. It was rather difficult at first to express what made home important. Then I realized that for me, home is where I can take off all of the assorted masks that I am forced to wear out there in the social world. And then I was reminded of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s We Wear the Mask. I think that it is fantastic poem, and while written by an African-American poet in response to discrimination, it is perfectly applicable to the human experience as a whole – perhaps even more so now, given the many forms of communication where people can pretend to be or misrepresent themselves on a daily basis. In my experience, people rarely show all that they are; be it for fear of rejection by their peers or because they are in fact, afraid of whom they are underneath. I do hope that eventually society can move past presenting facades to one another, but I won’t hold my breath waiting.