A Rag Man

The beginning of the day is drab,
no inspiration for an ageing bard

who, in his callow youth aspired
and now knows only bleak despair.

No longer a willow sprouting green,
he searches for a fitting genre

for the wires in his hoary beard.
He prays his muse won’t leave him bared

for all to see his ragged torso
and the withering of his roots.

He grasps at memories and words,
a man whose couplet cut like a sword.

Kim M. Russell, 10^th April, 2018

My response to The Poetry School NaPoWriMo Prompt for Day 10: Anagram Rhyme

Ali says that, after a couple of days of being nice, he’s back to the difficult prompts. He’d like us to write poems using anagram rhyme — that is, our rhyming words should be anagrams of each other. To get the idea, we should look at ‘The Heron’ by Randall Mann and ‘Illustration from Parsifal’ by Richie Hofmann, which are both written in couplets but ours don’t have to be.

This was really tricky but, once I got the title (an anagram of ‘anagram’), the rest kind of followed, aided by the willow tree in our garden and the approach of 23rd April!