poetry

First Loves in Poetry

Sally

The fog comes on little cat feet
Highwayman comes riding
First loves
In poetry become heartbeat
This love is abiding
Because

The moon’s tossed upon cloudy seas
And meanwhile the wild geese
Fly home
i thank you God, for rhymes like trees
That become gentle breeze
Poem

This week’s W3 challenge is to write a Memento — a poetic form created by Emily Romano. A memento poem captures a holiday, anniversary, or meaningful moment held in memory.

The poem is written in two stanzas. Each of the two stanzas follows this syllabic pattern:

  • Line 1: 8 beats
  • Line 2: 6 beats
  • Line 3: 2 beats

This pattern is repeated once per stanza, for a total rhyme scheme of a / b / c / a / b / c in each stanza.

True story: I wrote a Memento poem about what I thought was the first poem that I ever wrote. My mother had saved the paper witten in my blocky large first grade printing. She told me that it was the first poem I wrote. I always thought it was a pretty darn good poem for a six year old.

Then I fact-checked my mother this morning. I did NOT compose that poem. Oh, I wrote it on a piece of paper and got a gold star from my teacher, but it was not my original words. [sad face]

So, I tried to remember when my love affair with poetry began.

It was probably One Fish, Two Fish by Dr. Seuss. He still influences my writing.

But Carl Sandburg’s poem Fog is the first stand-alone, non-nursery rhyme, non-Dr. Seuss poem that I remember loving.

I memorized The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes a few years later. That was the beginning of my love affair with story poems. We had a book of story poems that included Casey at the Bat and The Cremation of Sam McGee, but I loved the melodrama of The Highwayman.

I found that story-poem book in a box recently. It was in sad shape. Such is the fate of much-loved books.

So what was the first poem I ever wrote? I have no idea.

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Published by Sally

14 thoughts on “First Loves in Poetry”

  1. Sally, I love your background about how you came to poetry, and I love your Memento too, how you combine your favourite poems into your own poem. ‘The fog comes on little cat feet’ is a wonderful image from Sandberg’s poem.

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  2. I had a subscription to Children’s Digest when I was a kid. One edition had the Highway Man. The cover had a painting of it. Loved that poem. The little cat feet I remember from a writing class in high school.

    The first poem I wrote was in elementary school. I sent it in somewhere and it did not get published. It began “There is a village far away, where all the children laugh and play and they do not go to school….” That is all I remember of it.

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  3. Hehe! My mother had lots of books of poetry – of which I have a couple… My first poem that I memorized was “My mind to me a kingdom is” by William Byrd as published in Collier’s Cyclopedia in 1880… As for your Memento – it’s wonderful!!

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    1. You’re so kind, Val. I feel like my poem was what happens when you put a bunch of lines from other poems into a pot, stir it around a bit, and pull something out. It may or may not make sense to people.

      I looked up “My mind to me a kingdom is” What a great poem!

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    1. Oh Shaun — sometimes I write something and don’t know what it even was that I wrote. The words just come out. Then someone comes and gives it a name like you just did — a poetic memory scrapbook. What a great name for it! That’s exactly what it is!

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  8. Sally, I really like how the echoes of Fog and i thank You God for most this amazing feel lived-in, not decorative. “First loves / in poetry become heartbeat” reads to me like the quiet core of the poem…

    ~David

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