It’s All Greek to Me

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Theatre
Democracy
Lighthouses
Cartography
Odometers
Geometry
Marathons
Peer juries
The Olympics
Pericles
Alarm clocks
Thucydides
Safe doctors
Swears Hippocrates
Anchors
Philosophy
Waterwheels
History
Cranes
Sophocles
Showers
Demosthenes
Maria Callas
Archimedes
Clock towers
Vending machines
Moussaka
Socrates
Alexander the Great
Eratosthenes
The Spartans
Stories for movies
El Greco
Onassis
Nia Vardalos
Pythagoras
Mythology
Ouzo
Cheap holidays

It’s all Greek to me

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If you haven’t come across one before, this is a list poem. List poems are exactly what they sound like – a poem in list form. I have some rhymes and half-rhymes in this one because it’s a bit of fun.

A half-rhyme (also known as a near-rhyme or slant rhyme) is when two words sound similar but are not proper rhymes, such as elk/milk or (from the poem) cartography/geometry.

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To Do Today

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Wake up
Pick up phone: messages/emails
The news (if I dare)
Mean to reply later
Wordle Worgle Quordle
Prayerdle Squarewordwordledle (it’s early)
Gummy Drop, because there was that one day
I forgot to play and lost my daily reward
and I’m on Day 1307 and that’s a big reward to lose
Read
Turn off alarm
Cuddle dogs
Get up
Go downstairs
Feed dogs
Wee…and wee…and wee…
Let dogs out
Yell at dogs to stop barking
Harry dogs in
Make a brew
Feed me
Make a brew
Read
Make a brew
Exercise
Make a brew
Update To Do list
Make a brew

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I’m doing a Summer Retreat writing workshop this week, run by Gill Lambert. This poem was inspired by an exercise on Day 1.

This is a list poem. List poems are easy to write: just write a list! If you feel like it, throw in a few rhymes and repetitions; and there you have it: a poem.

Or, put another way:

This Is A List Poem

List poems are easy to write
Just write a list
Throw in a rhyme
Throw in a repetition
Rhyme, if you’ve time
Repeat, to be neat
Write a list
A short list
A long list
A mocking-the-form list
A normal list
Any list
And then you’ll have
A poem
A list poem

If My Imagination Existed

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If my imagination existed it would be
tarmac
a prison cell
a seventies’ tower block
a barren womb
a medieval dungeon
a zero-hours contract
a call centre
the inside of my vacuum cleaner
the underside of my bed
a dirty window
a divorce
Bleak House
obsolete technology
Madame Bovary
my fashion sense
a winter flowerbed
a summer drought
the Kalahari
a summer safari
the first day of school
a litter tray
coffee
dark chocolate
a ready meal
a split fingernail
Parliament
conceptual art
a frozen monitor
a factory farm
a puppy farm
a knacker’s yard
Gethsemane
the end of the rainbow
a cheap ballpoint pen
a yawn
anywhere that anyone who moves to Hollywood leaves
jazz
rocket science
my purse
the last time I drove a car
my adult children’s home bedrooms
next week
a badly-written romance
TV movie-acting
Easter eggs in January
my diet
2022