Abecedarians are a simple way to practice writing poems because the constraint is minimal and has an ending built in. In English, we only have 26 letters, whereas Japanese has 3 alphabets containing over one thousand characters. There are many beautifully written abecedarians, like Natalie Diaz’s “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphim Subjugation of a Wild Indian Reservation.” I love how seamlessly the lines go together:
Angels don’t come to the reservation.
Bats, maybe, or owls, boxy mottled things.
Coyotes, too. They all mean the same thing—
death. And death
eats angels, I guess, because I haven’t seen an angel
fly through this valley ever.
Here is one of my attempts:
Frog Abecedarian
Amphibians are a lot of
beating hearts. They are wet, slimy
creatures, maybe sweet to some.
Deep in the lily pads almost
every night sit the
frogs
gathering their crucks and croaks
heaving
in insects and
jostling with each other, the
katydids don’t mind.
Long ago, other frogs
met each other at
noon,
offering croaks and crucks at the same
pond.
Queens are important.
Royalty is the frog,
Speaking only for themselves,
they
Uttered their crickety
Voices,
Waited for night. An
X number of frogs, and
zero toads.
Here are a couple more:
Hangul Abecedarian by Frank Choi
Elegy Abecedarian by Devi S. Lasker