I’m sad. Poetry month is over and if you hadn’t noticed, I really like poetry. I actually think I’ll just keep writing poems anyway. I should probably put out a warning that this next poem is really depressing as you can see by the title. It’s about a girl who’s father beats her and her family is so poor she must work to put food on the table at a small convenience store. Now I’m going to describe the poem so if you’re bored already you can skip straight to the poem now, I won’t be offended. So, there is a lot of alliteration in this poem. I put the s or sh sound in every line but I didn’t really check to see if the lines were truly alliteration. There is at least the letter s throughout the whole poem. Really this poem started out as an image. The image of a young cold girl walking up a hill to a Japanese shrine. I came up with the first line and thought, man, there’s a lot of s’ in that line. Then I thought, well why not do the whole poem with alliteration? Then it was just a matter of describing this young girl’s life through alliteration. I unintentionally used quite a bit of . I only realized this after I’d written the poem. It’s kind of rough, I didn’t revise, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. I mean, I hope you enjoy the poem. Not the girl’s suffering. Yikes, that’d be scary, ok enough rambling. Just read the poem!
A Circle of Suffering
The shrine was her shelter
A shield against the outside world
Snowflakes swirled on the wind
The sinking sun glows blood red
Rickety wooden stairs creak, the paper door slides
She kneels, the storm of her thoughts are soothed
The statue of a god smiles at her
The only smile she’s ever seen
What god is it? She doesn’t know
There’s only safety in his shrine
Incense sticks smolder
Soft candle light burns steady
The wind hisses, it can’t get to her here
Yet is knows she will come out soon
She does. She must.
Life hides in the depths of her eyes
The gates to her soul are shut tight
The shadow of a slap lies on her cheek
Scars slink across her arms
Tears are now strangers
They haven’t seen her for many years
Crunch crunch, shuffling through the snow
The wind now shrieks in her ears
Yet Silence spreads throughout the town
People scrounge in the garbage
Battling for scraps
Buildings crumble, rusted, sad
Shelter is found but not Home
Inside, Anger and Sorrow haunt
Dinner is the soup of something, god knows what
The sound of sips from a beer make her wince
Demon eyes search for her flaws
More shadows and scars appear
The suffering pauses
She now slips under sheet covers
Staring at the stars she can’t sleep
The clock announces mornings arrival
She moves towards the front door
The door shuts softly
Slamming it would’ve resumed the pain
She skitters across the ice
Tracing her steps, footprints are make anew in the rising snow
The ice doesn’t sparkle, black clouds shroud the sky
The store is a dull grey and black
Sickly yellow lights shine, flickering inside
The uniform slips on, scanning items begins
She works for hours, scanning, scanning, scanning
People starve but they still find money to buy crumbs
The sky, a hazy grey darkens
The work pauses
Tracing her steps, footprints are made anew in the rising white
Stinging snow finds it’s way through the rags to her skin
She continues on up the road
Up the hill, up the stairs, to the shrine
The shrine was her shelter
A shield against the outside world
Snowflakes swirled on the wind...
http://www.wallchan.com/wallpaper/44586/download/- Link to rundown city picture
(635 words)
