But is it poetry?

The challenge was to write blank verse: not something I really understand, but – hey, I joined this challenge to learn, didn’t I?

My poems scan, their lines carefully rhymed
and of a length, with syllables aligned.

Its beats are bars in a melody’s score.
Its rules are like bars of a cage.

If words know no restraints, how do I tame them?
If lines have no boundaries, what shapes them?
Dare I break free from the safe pen I know
and risk uncharted freedoms?

Will my words soar like a bird from its cage?
Or crash like an unprepared fledgling?
Fowl squawking from the earthbound.

Rhythms of other cultures don’t speak to my feet.
Atonal chants from distant lands sound alien to my ears.
Un-rhymed and unmetered, how can I know it’s poetry?

As carrier birds, liberated, will flutter home,
I’ll wing my way back to the rhymes of my comfort zone.

But how do I know if it’s poetry?