Everybody, I need some poetry help!?

Question by Eddy: Everybody, I need some poetry help!?
I have to make a ‘Where I’m From’ poem for school. It has to have memories about my childhood, and a bit of what happened. My poem must answer these questions while rhyming at the same time:

What items were commonly found around your house?
Where were your favorite places to go?
What landmarks or items were in your neighborhood?
Are there any people who significantly impacted your childhood?
Were there any specific sayings or phrases you heard a lot? Who said them?
Did you recieve a special nickname?
Which foods played a role in your childhood?
Did you have favorite family traditions?
What things comforted you as a child?
Are there any funny or embarrassing stories that follow you through life?

* The poem must be 16 lines long, it has to have a repeating pattern like “I am from” or something similiar, should include imagery and figurative language, and should have a creative and fitting title. Here’s the information about me:

My name is Ed ( actually it’s not, but I just don’t want people knowing me) , but my nickname is Eaddy. The items commonly found around my house when I was a kid were just a bunch of toys and books. I’m fourteen years old. I was born in America and lived there for 10 years. When I was ten, I moved to Ethiopia and stayed there for four years. Now I’ve just moved back and now I live in America. While I was a kid I never went anywhere, as I loved staying in the house. But I did like going to Costco for the free samples. There was pretty much nothing special in my neigborhood, but there was a big nice pond. There weren’t any people in America that had a significant impact on me, but in Ethiopia there were many people that had a huge impact on me, like teachers, family, and many other kinds of people. There were many Ethiopian phrases that I heard a lot, but one of them was ‘Tchh!!’ The pronounciation is completely different from the English pronouciation, but the meaning is the same. I usually nicknamed my brother ‘Yonny’. A traditional food I had in Ethiopia was injera. A tradition that I used to have in Ethiopia was that every Ethiopian holiday we prayed and apologized all morning for everything bad we did. An embarrassing story that always haunts me is that one time I lied to a P.E. teacher saying that I broke my leg through a small explosion, when I instead was perfectly fine and just wanted to avoid exercise. She of course took me to the principles office and I spoke with 5 people for 3 hours non-stop, and I eventually told the truth.

My question is, can you give me any good ideas that would be useful? Also, you can you write a few lines ( Like 2 or 3) that I should use that would be good? I don’t want it to be boring, but I don’t want it to be too childish to. Please, anything you think I should know you should state. I need all the help I can get because I really suck at poetry. Thank you so much!!

Best answer:

Answer by Elizabeth Athineu
Here’s an example I cooked up:

Step by step, I stop and look, and step by step I thought
Back on the life from West to East I’d lived, almost forgot;
The western hub, the USA, encompassed by my books and toys,
Then on to Ethiopia, Injera(1) , soft, and other joys.
Only toys and only books with Yonny(2) and myself existed,
Then to a land of lessons, learned, more than bread and yet insisted
On the speaking of new phrases, Tchh(3) and other vocal kinds.
Rainbows, I learned, of skins, and sounds, of spirits and their minds;
Oh yes, there were toys and books galore in America’s liberation,
And yet no tutoring took place’ til I reached the darker nation.
Oh, God! Yes, here I learned to pray, celebrating His forgiveness.
I saw the variance of his grace in the people’s joyful semblance.
This decade void of decadence, filled full with understanding;
No toys for play or books for thought, I met a life demanding
Of my mind and soul, not flesh, I learned of joy without the play;
I learned of peoples, prayers and learned; not where, I am from those days!

Footnotes:
1)- Injera: soft, spongy, yeast flatbread
2)-Yonny: my older brother
3)-Tchh!: a phrase I learned to favor there

The trick with poetry is to not state the obvious and really play around with meanings and sounds. Feel free to play around with this in whatever way you want, but it’s a good, rough guideline and you may feel free to take credit for it as well since it was your words that guided my hands and thoughts. The recurring theme here is that there were toys and books in America, but you really learned things and enjoyed life in Ethiopia. At the end it says I am from those days, implying that you really discovered or began to discover who you were during that time and it didn’t matter where you were. I hope this helps and I wish you an A on this and some realization as well!

Namaste’- Elizabeth

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