Day 9 of NaPoWriMo. Prompt: Because today is the ninth day of NaPoWriMo, I’d like to challenge you to write a nine-line poem. Although the fourteen-line sonnet is often considered the “baseline” form of verse in English, Sir Edmund Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene using a nine-line form of his own devising, and poetry in other languages (French, most particularly) has always taken advantage of nine-line forms. You can find information of various ways of organizing rhyme schemes, meters, etcetera for nine-line works here. And of course, you can always eschew such conventions entirely, and opt to be a free-verse nine-line poet.

I’ve taken the last option: free-verse nine-line poem.

a writer must be tenacious though mendacious a thought

because a writer writes a gracious struggle, ideas juggle

attempting to find the word though blurred sometimes

absurd means expecting crystallization causation when

frustration thrusts tendrils of focus disturbing locus,

foundation jars loose. Not about publication, but stopping

ablation of ideas, dictation of truths, locating proofs,

money can’t quell. Bombshell, why I write, to explore thoughts,

feelings, mold untold reasons, brain pleasing, to glean meaning.

end 4/9/2017

S. Darlington