Jay’s Way: For the Birds

This poem is a part of the poetic ‘scavenger hunt’ designed by @murisopsis from A Different Perspective. This time the theme is Names, as in poetic forms that feature a name (e.g. one of the prompts is to write a poem in the form of “Amandas Pinch” — a form I’ve personally never heard of before). There are thirteen prompts in total so this is more manageable then a daily commitment challenge. Check out all the prompts and the way it works here and join in if your up for some poetic puzzling. Enjoy!

Prompt 12

Write a poem using the form Jay’s Way or write a poem using a bird metaphor.

A Different Perspective

A Jay’s Way poem is composed of 12 lines with syllable count 3/7/11/9/5/3/3/5/9/11/7/3 and rhyme scheme a/b/b/c/c/d/d/e/e/f/f/a. Full rules here.

For the Birds

In fifth grade
I fell for the blue jay birds
And wrote about them in a thousand plus words
Copied verbatim from a bird book
Word for word I took
From the page
Like a sage
Full of blue jay facts
And of their natural habitats
I wrote them out neatly onto paper stock
Not a single thought ad-hoc
Ever made.

A sadly true story. I went on to write several research papers covering the Jay family until my teacher finally realized what was going on. To be fair, I’d never learned better so it was a ‘good teaching moment’.

Be well,

Monty

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