My Experience at the Poetry Workshop

'A few drops of Ink’, a poetry workshop was a great way for me to zone out from the hustle and bustle of schoolwork and dive into the realm of creativity. You could say I’m a very lazy poet as I usually write a poem once a year for some school project and that too by making every line of the poem rhyme. Well, this is because I thought that ‘making it rhyme’ was the only thing I needed to know to start writing a poem. It turns out this workshop proved me wrong. I learned an astonishing thing - non-rhyming poems were just as beautiful or if not, more beautiful, as rhyming poems. I guess that makes sense now because looking back at my old poems I noticed that rhyming sometimes makes the poem lose its meaning and charm. My favourite activity in the workshop was the very first activity. We were instructed to write five alliterative phrases and make sentences with them. This was to teach us to write alliterative sentences. The fun part? The phrases or sentences need not make sense and so we all came up with phrases which were hilarious! The workshop also made me write poems of a genre that I had never experimented with. For example, dark poetry. Here’s a dark poem written by me in the workshop.

Lone Survivor 

Father, Father who is that a-murmuring?

Is it them who break doors and murder all those innocent folks?

They who came and bound us with ropes, 

 they who planted false ideas in people’s minds and crushed all our hopes!

Father, father tell me why your eyes are on the door?

Are they to torture us to the core?

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will.

I’m afraid they have taken him.

Later I’d come to know, I was a lone survivor.

And be one traveler long I stood, 

And looked down as far as I could. 

I ran. Ran like a deer running from a beast.

Leaving my father and others who had deceased.

This poem is written from the perspective of a survivor of a concentration camp in Nazi Germany.

All in all this workshop truly taught me a lot about poetry and encouraged me to put my thinking hat on and just let the words flow!

Yukthasri Jaligama

9D