A Poem for Valentine's Day

A blog can be a story, an article, a quote, or a picture, it can be a link or a collection of links. It can be an opinion or an assessment, a review or an analysis. It could if you wanted it to be, a song or a poem, which seeing as it's Valentine's Day, I thought I'd do something brave and share with you a piece of poetry. Even better than, I'm sharing with you a piece of poetry that I wrote myself!

A few posts back, I asked the question "£200, what would you do?" and went on to tell you about my creative writing course and my expectations for it. Well, off I went, my first week and was immediately assigned with my first task; the monthly competition:

'With St Valentine's Day taking place this month we require a poem of no more than 20 lines celebrating unrequited love. This can be in any form. To be handed in on...'

“Great!” I thought, “nothing like starting at the deep end!” But have since spent many a quiet moment thinking about what on earth I could write, in this form, about a subject I am very fortunate to have not too much experience in.

Whatever your views are on Valentines Day, whether you are an old romantic at heart and go to great lengths to make your partner feel special, or sit under the “I don't need a specific day to tell my partner I love them, I tell them everyday” cloud, is entirely up to you. But there are plenty of people out there who are deeply in love, secretly in love and going through things that I can only imagine.

Trying to put myself into that mindset took me back to my early teenage days, those awkward times when any girl so much as spoke to you, chemicals reacted, anatomical appendages extended and your heart would send your brain messages that needed to be decoded by the Enigma machine.

So I sat, at my desk, pencil in hand and threw a load of words together, baring in mind that my current written poem anthology stands at zero entries, and wrote, after much tinkering, chopping and changing, something that I felt was not only suitable enough for human consumption, but would be able to be entered into a creative writing competition without the judges collectively laughing and thinking 'who on earth wrote this?'

As a further attempt to massage my confidence I went and spoke with the agency poet laurette, an insanely intelligent chap named Rish, who read, corrected and congratulated me on a piece well done, which left me feeling rather pleased for myself and happy that I hadn't made too much of an embarrassment of myself!

In Tuesday's class I'll be forced to hand in in my completed poem, but before I do, I wanted to share it with you to pass the all important 'readers test', so with much fanfare and no further ado, I'd like to present you with, my poem, on the subject of 'Unrequited Love':

A Lover's Woe

Eternal prayer at cupid's altar
Dear father, I worship your daughter
Broken heart, torn asunder
Raindrop tears, sound like thunder
Neglect, rejection despite my affection
Intense pain, death by injection

If you'd like to comment, please do so, or even sharing your own words on the same subject would be amazing!