Thursday, July 12, 2012

My Poetic Meter is Running in the Wrong Direction

Khara House started a form poetry challenge on her blog, Our Lost Jungle. The first challenge was to work in iambic meter. Khara explained " Iambic meters are broken down into a “foot” [also called an iamb] of two syllables, the first unstressed and the second stressed (like the word “about”)."

I guess you could say I got off on the wrong foot when I started working on my poem. I suddenly had no unstressed/stressed words in my vocabulary. Every word that came to mind was the opposite. I  thought about tweaking a few words like "on LY" or "le EFT", but decided even poetic license didn't allow that.

I needed a distraction. What, I tried to remember, is the opposite of iambic? Is it amibic?  Actually, it is trochaic meter and the trochees were winning by a landslide.

I took a break for a few days. The finished product is below. I'm sorry its late, but I was having a little trouble with my feet.

Wildfires

Ablaze, the flames
traverse the land.
The trees, the homes,
the towns consumed.
But still, among
the ash remains
a will-resolve
to recreate.


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