The Eighth Sermon to the Dead

This time, I had my lovely wife Paddy pick 7 words, and I rhymed them and made this: Sometimes we are called to do our duty, Although it can be quite challenging. Events may lead us to find some booty, Or Good Fortune can leave us and take wing. And as it is written in the Good Book Thy skin's as fair as Tawny Antelope's. African stories, comfortable nook, Long bubble baths with soft silky soap, The rain beats on window pane in rhythm, The longing to travel no books can staunch. Remembered airport announcement hymn, Adventurous desire soon to launch. Seeking new horizons I advocate, The airplane is here, I'm at my gate. The exercise has been wonderful. I'm enjoying the creative flow of being timed, forced, and restricted. I must admit though, that this one took longer, about 18 minutes. 1) I didn't have a rhyming dictionary, which I did for the first one. 2) I was interrupted by a cat demanding people time.

Andrew Watt of  Wanderings in the Labyrinth  issued a Poetry challenge for April. It went like this: Exercise One: Master a form In medieval and Renaissance Ireland, historical sources indicate that the surviving bardic schools would wrap a student in a blanket after giving the student a theme and a form. The theme would be a figure from Ireland’s myth or history; the form would be one of the traditional formats of Irish poetry. We can deduce three elements from this — subject matter (theme), limitation of distractions (blanket), and structure (form). For this exercise, we’re going to use the Sonnet as our form. There are others — ballades, odes (one of my favorites), sestinas, haiku, and more. Sonnets are good for this, though because they’re longer than haiku and they’re governed by three core rules: 1. They have fourteen lines; 2. The last words of each line rhyme, in a specific pattern: ABABCDCDEFEFGG 3. Each line has ten syllables and a gentle rhythm ca

It's been a while since I've written. This is a personal post, not a lot of deep gnostic thought here. Yet, the gnosticism is there, if you dig for it. 1) Anger: I knew something was wrong, as my manager had presented me with a 90 day plan to improve my skills. It was a panic inducing plan. Stuff I'd never heard of. Tools I hadn't used. I'm a developer, and a number of these tools seemed to be more on the engineering realm. 15 days into the plan, I'm let go.  It's not fair. I was working the plan. 2) Conflict: This is not the first time I've been let go because my skills were not where the employer needed to be. I'm angry, I feel upset that my professional skills have been disregarded, but at the same time I'm relieved. Relieved. I've never really liked programming. I like problem solving, I like helping folks and making their job easier, and I like building something. But programming was always just a tool, a means to an end. There a