Short-Shorts
May 2010
An Author's Lament
I think readers all seem to lose sight
Of the effort it takes us to write
Even a simple refrain
With beginning so plain:
“T’was a dark and stormy night…”
“A shot rang out” should come next
Or the reader may well become vexed.
Even poems need action
To give them some traction,
Converted, of course, into text.
There are story devices we follow
Lest our writing begins to sound hollow.
Crisis, denoument, plot –
Number of words, not a lot
Or the verbiage will make the piece wallow.
With poems, the rhyme is the thing
That with meter will make the piece sing.
Although there are those
That read better as prose –
In which case, the rhyme and meter don’t matter anyway.
In the end, I must make a confession –
To me writing has become an obsession.
To tame all those words,
So like high-flying birds
And with each of them craft a confection.