Poetry is not all that easy. Some people, Edward Lear, for instance, made rhymes tumble effortlessly. Poetry is more than rhyme and rhythm. As Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum state at the end of The Prosody Handbook, "...the rhyme exists for the sake of the poem, and not vice versa."
Fitting the poem to a specific poetic form, a couplet or a limerick or a sonnet, in which line length, rhyme scheme and number of lines are predetermined is akin to solving a puzzle. We have the idea and the image or emotion and then we find words to fit the poetic form.
Over on Writer's Digest's Poetic Asides, Robert Lee Brewer has issued a challenge to write zejels! Until the challenge landed in my inbox, I never even HEARD or zejels. Brewer gives instructions on how this old Spanish, or perhaps Arabian, poetic form is constructed. Check out the challenge here.
I love a challenge. So, here is my entry. Hopefully, my effort will show up on Poetic Asides someday soon.
Good or bad?
Every time I rip out a weed
I wonder - could it fill a need?
Does a cure hide in leaf or seed?
That discarded stem, root, or flower -
a blot cleared from my garden bower -
might hold calming good health or power
if left in place to spread and breed.
The foragers might find true worth
in these plants I pull from the earth -
oils to sooth or to promote mirth,
or hungry multitudes to feed.
Still I tug and tear, pull, reject
the plants that grow without respect.
There are rules I cannot reject,
that botanists, long gone, decreed.
Karen Maurer
zejel July 11, 2019
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