Today’s prompt from NaPoWriMo was to write using anaphora, a rhetorical strategy in which the same word or a phrase begins each line or stanza. It’s a cool idea and there are a lot of great ones out there and tons of super famous ones. In a short poem like a sonnet, the risk is to make a poem that sounds repetitive, not in a good way. I tried beginning each line of a sonnet with the same word or phrase and it just sounded dorky and nonsensical. So I decided to break my sonnet up today into tercets, to repeat my word or phrase every three lines to see if I could avoid the redundancy effect. I don’t know if it’s successful. I mean, the structure works perfectly fine, but for some reason in this poem, I tried to “say something,” and that for me is almost always a recipe for disaster. See what you think.
Better to be a pagan, suckled in…
Better to be a pagan, suckled in
a creed outworn, says Wordsworth in his poem,
than to be, his words, too much with the world.
Better to be a godless good person
than a religious hypocrite or bigot,
someone who doesn’t know Jesus from Adam.
Better to read everything you can read
than to have pretended to read one book
while trying to stop others from learning.
Better to be pro-life by simply not
having an abortion, or by preventing war,
than by taking away choice for others.
Better to watch, read, speak, listen, and vote,
than to wave a flag or those guns you tote.
michael jarmer 