Time Was...Love Is...Ramblings...

Book excerpt: Poetry is a mysterious combination of images, sounds, reflections prompted by reader and writer, a rhythm of thoughts conveyed in expressive phrases to convey subtle or blunt messages. Poetry is a challenge to the uninitiated and a rewarding experience to those who revel in imagination. Times change. Some disparage the simple rhyme. Yet the sing-song effort of positioning image with image tickles the imagination, spurs the memory, and prompts recollections of other times and other feelings. Rhyming, when forced, results in cheap efforts to create images or phrases based on convention. Words that result in confusion fail in that the reader misses the intended thought. Ballads, odes, songs, sonnets, elegies, epigrams, epitaphs, inscriptions, and autographs come into their own in their own times and days. Many linger and stand true through the ages. Flawed artistic forms fall short to dismay their observers by lack of substance, or perhaps even by lack of convention. No claim is made here that any of the following will linger through time unscathed or even remembered. Some may be challenged by their lack of substance. A few, perhaps, will strike a convergent point of identity and be accepted for what they are: observations by one recalling points in time.