The Poems That I Wrote

June 05, 2021

Imagine having to write a poem in English when you’re not a poet–you’re not even good at writing poetry in your native language, and the poem must contain 50 words telling a short story! That was the assignment given by Alan Maley, a British poet who, at the time of this writing, has been involved in English Language Teaching (ELT) for 55 years. I can still vividly remember struggling to write such a poem in addition to a nine-word “diamond-shaped” poem during a poetry workshop conducted by Maley at the International Conference on English Language Teaching 2013 at Equatorial Hotel Melaka, Malaysia. I must say that Professor Alan Maley was excellent at coaching us all–his workshop participants. That was eight years ago.

At this point in time, under Malaysia’s Third Movement Control Order (MCO 3.0) during the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m staying at home recalling the aforementioned poems whose soft copies were stored on a couple of hard drives a few years back; one of them is now broken–not a single file can be retrieved.

It’s a good thing I managed to recover the fifty-word anecdote-like poem and the nine-word “diamond-shaped” poem from one of my external hard drives. I’m glad I still have them in a Microsoft Word document. Here are the poems!

A Fly in the Soup

by Zulkifli Hashim, 20 November 2013

A sophisticated lady

cringes at a fly in her soup

in a posh restaurant

which is no better

than a humble-looking eatery.

With contempt and disgust,

she watches the fly

moving around in her soup.

She asks the waiter what it’s doing.

To the waiter, it’s drowning

or even mocking.

Practice

by Zulkifli Hashim, 20 November 2013

Practice

doesn't really

make perfect but

perfect practice

does.

Yes, the poem “A Fly in the Soup” was intended to be universally satirical. It still is. As for the poem “Practice”, of course you know those many well-known quotable quotes (about practice), based on which I wrote it.

It's 2021 now, but for some reason, I've started exploring the wonders of English poetry more deeply amidst the mysteries of the coronavirus pandemic that scientists have begun to unravel by the Will of Allah.

- Zulkifli Hashim, Kuala Lumpur