“Will you barter for your garden?”
the familiar stranger taunted.
His haunting talk caught on a loose thread in my heart,
recalling time and battles fought.
Make no mistake about the fae.
I must admit I was afraid, for I have seen my adversary
tear out the grass’s screaming hair,
poison the soil with atmosphere arid,
strip the baby branches barren,
shave the landscape clear.
I need not obey him.
I have in my hands a *****
and around this place an angry hedge.
He can not prevail unless I show him the way.
“No,” say I,
“No bartering in my garden today.”
This one was for the poetry class I'm taking(!).
The assignment was to write a rhyming or metered poem. I decided to use assonance focused around the letter "a" as much as possible. This is not a way that I often use rhyme. I really, really like it. It stitches the words together without feeling to sing-song or structured. If you scroll back to my stuff from a year or two ago, you'll see that I used a lot of line-end rhymes and lots of meter. I don't like the way that kind of structure feels anymore, but I also don't like writing poems that ignore the use of sound. This is a happy medium for me.