National Poetry Month Challenge - Day 4
Jumping over candlesticks,
he spreads his legs wide,
claps his hands above his head,
lands safely on the other side.
All trades he practices,
he butchers, bakes, and even makes
the candlestick before he jumps,
and he scatters hoary flakes.
Clearly clever, he stows away
to sail the seven seas,
and while aboard he eats no fat
with his dried beans and peas.
Keen on beans, on shore he grows
a giant stalk and climbs, coming back
with the goose, the gold and glad
his mother named him Jack.
--Katherine Quimby Johnson. All rights reserved.
This one is a variation on the acrostic, with the letter starting a stanza, not a line. It's definitely a work in progress; I'm not completely happy with the last stanza, and some other lines need work. But if I'm going to post a poem a day, some (most?) are going to be unpolished.
My "Jack" poem was inspired by something extremely clever Neil Gaiman did in The Graveyard Book, but I went at it from a different angle.