The Heritage of Rage (NaPoWriMo 2016)

Once again, I decided to try today’s prompt from the official NaPoWriMo site: write a tritina. To make it even more challenging, I used an online random word generator to come up with three words. (From another perspective, this could be seen as avoiding the work of thinking up three words for myself.) With three words randomly generated, writing this poem became mostly an act of galumphing.

I should probably note that this poem isn’t autobiographical. While my heritage is mixed (but overwhelmingly northern European), I don’t have any particular rage connected to it, nor do I yearn for an ancestral sky.

The Heritage of Rage

The rage of my heritage is like a mongrel
Dog, barking at the sky
to scare off the thunder. Serenity

Is nowhere to be found. Serenity
for such a mixed-breed mongrel
as me yearns for the sky

Of my ancestral home: a sky
from which I am sundered. Serenity
Is nowhere to be found. Mongrel

Heritage, mongrel sky, and a rage beyond the dream of serenity.