Poetry: Short Poems

Winter

Colder winds blow there

Swaying trees on a hillside

A small flower grows

Voicemail

“I’m sorry, hang up,”

That high voice on the machine

Can make me angry

The Dog

As the

            Dog

  Sits

On the grass

            I wonder

Why

        I worry

    So

Much

Pretzels

Pretzels are good

Pretzels are yummy

As I’m writing this poem

I feel really hungry

Author Notes: These four poems I wrote a long-ish time ago (I was about 9? 13? 10? 4? I really don't know. I don't think I was 4.) Anyway, at the time I was experimenting with various poetry styles and seeing how they worked. With the haiku verse, it wasn't the 5-7-5 syllable structure I had problems with, it was following the style of the content. That's why it swayed between natural images and...voicemail? I'm sure I had a very good reason for that. 

The poem "The Dog" was one of my first forays into free verse, and I really enjoyed it. As I was experimenting with word placement and making it a visual statement as well as a word statement, the shifting of the word placement began to mimic the lazy drifting of the the thought process in the poem, which is cool. That's a device that I've used several times since in poems because I like it so much.

As for the last poem, I was young and I was hungry. That's my deep motivation. Sometimes poems really can be taken at face value. (No, they can't. Not really.)