It Is Time For A Nice Rhyme Elita Sohmer Clayman

I am from the old school of loving to write rhyming poetry. I write the poems to people I like and love and I make the last words of each sentence rhyme with the one before. I try to tell a story and say something about the person that I admire. Everyone that I send them to is really happy because there is not a lot of that type of rhyming going on.

I have enrolled into an online course starting in September and run by an online site called Coursera. It is free and this course I am taking is called Poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. It is given online by the University of Pennsylvania, which is a fine university. I often quote Emily, so I thought it would be interesting to study her works for five hours a week online and see what I can absorb. Her poetry is not the rhyming kind; I do believe it is easier to write, than rhymes.

I love writing poetry for each and every friend

I write the words and to them I do send

They seem to enjoy reading them all the time

Therefore, that is the reason, I do create the rhyme

This an example of it and it is simple and plain and is quite easy to ascertain.

My dad use to write my kind of poetry or I should say I write his kind of poetry. When my daughter was born, he wrote her a lovely welcoming poem. I still have it in her baby mementoes book where I saved all the baby items. When my son was born, my dad was gone, my son is named after him, so, I, when his son was born, I did like Dad and wrote for my third grandson a nice poem. I was carrying on the tradition of writing a poem for a grandson.

Dad was known in the family for his poem writing and now and then a relative would come to him, give him some facts and asked Dad to write for them. He really did not care to do that for someone he did not know and he found it hard to say no. When my Mom’s brother Louis lived with us before he married, he went to work on the night shift at about twelve midnight. He would write Dad a poem and Dad would answer him with one too. Dad saved them and when my uncle died several years ago, I gave to his daughter several sheets of the poems her Dad had written to my Dad, just about daily and ordinary things and she was thrilled to see them. Of course, it was about things happening then in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s long before she was born. Dad and Louis would discuss events in the poems about what was going on in the world then, family and working occurrences too. It was a cute relationship between two brothers-in-laws who really liked each other. Finally, Louis married and the poems ceased. When Dad passed on, Louis helped us with making the funeral arrangements and he recalled those nice poems between him and Joseph.

My first poem was on the day we moved from our house into an apartment quite a distance away when I was almost fourteen. It was about moving from this my first home to a new home in a different area. I related how sad I felt leaving my home and going somewhere else. “I hear the moving men coming up the street. They arrive quickly with their speedy and large feet. They move us to really far away. I guess I am quite sad on this very day.”

Emily did not have to find words that rhymed. She just put her thoughts with about five or six words in a line, wrote the next line, no rhymes, then a third line, a fourth line and that was it. She told a short, short, story in those four lines. Sometimes, I have to reread them to figure out what she is saying.

I am sure the course will teach me how to understand and love her works. Walt Whitman is a poet who I do not know too much about. His also will not be rhyming poetry.  I look forward to this course, no marks are given, though you take some kind of test at the end and you receive a certificate that you completed the course. It will be fun at seventy-eight to be taking some college courses.

I went back to get a college degree when I was thirty-three and eight months old. At that time, it was quite old to become a college student and the eighteen year olds in my classes looked at me like I was an old lady. However, I was the only one in those classes that really came to class each and every session, as the teens many times did not come to school often. I excelled and I was proud of the old lady in me to have accomplished this college study and I graduated five years later. I was always sorry that I did not attend the actual graduation, thinking I would really look old that day with all those teens. By then I was thirty-nine. If I had it to do over again, I would attend and hold my head high.

Now at seventy-eight, I am the old lady in the class, except there is no class, just a bunch of people taking knowledge online. Times have changed and it will be fun, I hope, to try this course. If I enjoy it, I may go further. It is never too late to learn anything. I always talk about it is never too late to learn ballroom dance and now I am taking my own unasked for advice; I am going online to learn some more.

 Voltaire said “It is not sufficient to see and know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.” I will be affected by the course in quite a positive way.

I end this article with this:

You are never too elderly otherwise known as old

To try to learn something, that is called being bold

Educating yourself at your now whatever age

Makes you a wise person, also known as a sage

So go about it and do whatever keeps you from feeling blue

Dance, learn, have fun,vacation, read, good times you are due

I thought it was now that I would compose and write you readers a rhyme

You deserve it because you are good people and I thought it was about time