How do you write a good poem?

February 24, 2022

How do you write a good poem?

How do you like your eggs? Boiled? Poached? Scrambled?

Me, I like mine sunny side up.

I used to be a scrambled kind of guy. Moreover, a runny mix of physics, chemistry and math blending across axes. In school, I wore my PCM tag like my other badges – Jaguar House Captain and FIRST Robotics team – with pride. Whether it was solving complex next-gen calculus in math or whisking my brain cells into action to determine the trajectory of a ball thrown off a cliff in physics – ‘cracking’ open a problem gave me an incomparable satisfaction. To me, numbers and symbols possessed limitless possibilities that syntax could not contain.

But that was before, before some ‘she who must not be named’ trauma. Under the ‘yoke’ of heartbreak, my first ever line of poetry appeared spontaneously. I simply downloaded it from my brain to my phone. When I read it, the lines took me by surprise. Until then, I had played predominantly with robotic Lego, never with poetic rhymes.

My first poem stemmed from a swell of emotion that no formula could define. I felt like an alchemist who could turn the base metal of ‘nothingness’ into something noble by acknowledging it in words. But this was a completely different kind of ‘chemistry’ for me. As this part of my personality began to take shape, I evolved from the gooey PCM ‘scramble’. Now, when I look from the frying pan to the mirror, I see myself as more of a sunny side up egg guy, recognizing my two distinct elements in the white and the yolk.

Like the egg white, I spread myself thin when it comes to my academic pursuits. I reach for new and complex challenges in every direction of the pan. For instance, when I visited my mother’s rural hometown, and her neighbours spoke at length about the ensuing drought, I used my technical background to design a sustainable device that uses solar energy to create water from air. As a member of my school’s FIRST Robotics Competition Team (FRC), when we couldn’t figure out how to make our robot carry a heavy load, I spent long nights researching different mechanisms until I finally designed an optimal cargo grabber. My academic interests, like the egg white, form the outer portion of who I am.

But, poetry – it’s my volcanic yolk-like centre. Unlike my academics, writing poems doesn’t require me to ‘solve’, it allows me to feel – feel whatever I want. The sudden urge to look back. The compelling desire to pause. The existential element of change. If I feel overwhelmed, ‘my eyes frozen with exhaustion’, I write about ‘raging waves of confusion’ in my poem ‘Daze’. Furthermore, if I feel nostalgic for ‘A zephyr that points towards home’ I catalogue it in, ‘A Reminiscence’. If I feel introspective, in ‘Identity’, I ask, ‘Who am I?’ and the answer is ‘A voice you can trust, a key to unopened doors.

My poems add colour to my life like a yolk brings sunshine to a white canvas.

At first, I thought that my analytical and creative aspects were too distinct to overlap. But the lessons I learned writing poetry, how to communicate my thoughts in short stanzas, made me an asset to my FRC team. When we were getting lost in coding that was augmented like a run-on sentence. I suggested breaking it down into simpler sets. Adopting the conditional loops, things made sense, and our robot took its first steps. Likewise, talking to the victims of drought while working on my solar water harvesting innovation made me more empathetic. In turn, this added a layer of sensitivity to my poetry that it lacked before. That’s what makes sunny side up eggs the best – that you can eat a bit of the white and a bit of the yellow separately, but also together!