Epic Poems Thread

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

You once said don't get you started with limericks. I can see why now...

Those are brilliant!

Danke.

I had a small notebook full of them once. I used to pick place names at random out of the atlas to see if I could come up with a couple of rhymes and then turn them into a limerick. I don't know if I've still got any of them written/printed out or not. A lot of them were on my old computer but I don't think I saved any of those files... so I just have to rely on memory.

There are so many that I can remember the "gist" of, or the rhyming words from the end of lines, but can't quite piece together how they went in full. I'm not sure if that's a sad thing, or just my aging brain's small gift to the rest of the world.

[Jimbuna]

Probably the latter

[Herr-Berbunch]

The wife's had a couple of poems published (including one about me), and she's quite good, but in my mind if it doesn't rhyme then I don't really listen It really winds her up

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Herr-Berbunch

The wife's had a couple of poems published (including one about me), and she's quite good, but in my mind if it doesn't rhyme then I don't really listen It really winds her up

Let's see it then

[Herr-Berbunch]

Originally Posted by jimbuna

Let's see it then

I'll dig it out later.

[Herr-Berbunch]

Okay, here it is. The background to it is that we met just a couple of weeks before I joined the RAF in 1993, fell in love etc., and she wrote this just before I was due home on leave from my trade training early the next year.:

The Dusk

People have laughed and people have cried,
Babes have been born and old men have died,
Someone has smiled at the thought of tomorrow
And someone has broken down, beaten by sorrow,
One man is lying in bed all alone,
Counting the hours till he will be home.
A girl's sitting counting those hours just the same
Tomorrow at dusk she'll be with him again.
And people will laugh and people will cry.
Babes will be born and old men will die.
And she will just smile and remember no more,
The hours that she counted just one dusk before.

[Gerald]

Great,you have good talent

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Herr-Berbunch

Okay, here it is. The background to it is that we met just a couple of weeks before I joined the RAF in 1993, fell in love etc., and she wrote this just before I was due home on leave from my trade training early the next year.:

The Dusk

People have laughed and people have cried,
Babes have been born and old men have died,
Someone has smiled at the thought of tomorrow
And someone has broken down, beaten by sorrow,
One man is lying in bed all alone,
Counting the hours till he will be home.
A girl's sitting counting those hours just the same
Tomorrow at dusk she'll be with him again.
And people will laugh and people will cry.
Babes will be born and old men will die.
And she will just smile and remember no more,
The hours that she counted just one dusk before.

Very nice...especially knowing the background behind it

[jumpy]

A bit of a resurrection, but I thought I'd share this with you all.

I'm currently reading one of two of the most epic poems of all time: The Odyssey. The other being The Illiad. I have both prose and the original meter translations of these great works of Homer (who or what he is or was is another debate entirely) and last night it jogged my memory of this thread enough to decide to contribute something of my own.

I've written many things since being a lad at school (what it is to be a teenager )
But these days I seldom put pen to paper unless I have something important to say... though generally it's only important to me hehe.

I don't tend to like things that don't rhyme, but I use words and alliteration and other devices as I see fit before me. Typically, a bastardisation of the rhyming couplet is the result, as my intent is always more about what I feel than some clever artifice of rhythm or stress on pronunciation. This can tend to be over-simplistic, but I don't think complication is always necessary for whatever it is you are trying to communicate. It's less about the reader and more about the writer. I know what I meant, you can draw your own conclusions.

This, and other posts here, are illustrative of how I think and write prose - sometimes the meaning is not always clear or obvious, which defeats the object, but sometimes too, it is as much about the journey as the destination. Verse, on the other hand, I consider wholly different.

In some ways these musings and writings are as close to a journal of my thoughts and feelings as my ill-discipline is likely to get - I tried writing a diary once... but I found I didn't really have much to say. That was a curious understanding at the time. These days I always think it right to not court hubris or dally with self indulgence for its own sake, though sometimes this is hard to recognise when you are under pressure of sorts.

To that end, writing and more specifically poetry, is a great distillation of thought and emotion, quite sufficient to allude circumstance and temper in such a way as to exorcise your personal shadows into the light of the page before you.

'Catharsis' is a more succinct description, but like 'dichotomy', it is a word that leaves a metaphorical scum behind on both the tongue and the mind for me - perhaps this is a throwback to english A-level classes.
As the only male in a class of some twenty young women (you may think this to have been a great opportunity but it was less than so, I can assure you haha) who, in their youth and impressionability, latched upon such words as above, with such fervour and diligence of mind as to make each lesson a tortuous hour of convolution and bombast, to shrink the sturdiest intellect to tears when contemplating Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Larkin or any number of literary greats (though I'm very much undecided that there's anything great about jane austen's 'mills and boon' efforts, despite popular opinion thinking otherwise).

But, though such personal reminiscence is laughing at me from time past in my youth - an amusement which given my last paragraph, is not lost upon me - I digress.

Here is something written earlier this year that makes some small attempt to coalesce my mind and heart in the aftermath of a time that brought me as close to ruin and self destruction as I'm ever likely to be, though this ought to be obvious.

Enough preamble, already...


Hari,

Don't look for a smile in the morning,
Don't look for warmth at night.
There's no-one there
When I cry out in the darklight.

So many memories of you
My tears cannot wash away.
Don't look for compassion
You can't tolerate or repay.

It was always about you;
Don't look for a kiss,
My lips are cold, Hari,
And taste but ashes.

Don't look for me,
My lips are blue.
Don't look for me, Hari.
It was all about you.

(04/2010)

I must note, that though I have added one or two words here and there after the majority was committed to paper, such subtle refinement, if you like, the rest seemed almost to write itself over a timespan of about five minutes; As though my hand and the pen and the mind that directed it were but a conduit for something other. What? I cannot say. Perhaps the heart or soul? Whatever, it does not demand scrutiny... it simply 'is' or rather 'was' and for that I am content.