Analysis of Tinkering
My old man loved tools, loved tinkering. Wrenches, drills,
screwdrivers, pliers. Black oily hands, greasy rags.
On his back under a chassis or ailing motorbike,
bits & pieces littering the garage, making things fit,
firing them up, fine tuning the timing, the gears,
those good-as-new machines, a metal puzzle-solver.
My mother didn’t tinker. Laundry, dishes, floors,
pots & pans, hands red raw, knees red dimples,
knotted kerchief on her head, apron tightly tied.
An aging Cinderella sweeping up dust,
her motto, ‘where there is spic there is span,’
clean, tidy, squared away, a smoother of sheets.
When my old man left us, we inherited a raided,
abandoned space. Gone the glistening, well-oiled tools,
the as-new car, the thrifty banknotes from
a can under the sink. His mind had never been idle.
All that tinkering, never once looked at a blueprint,
fitting it together in his head, on his back, under a chassis.
Scheme | XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111111100101 10101101101 1111001011010 1101000011011 101111001001 1111010101010 11011010101 111111110 101010110101 1100101011 0101111111 11010101011 11111110100010 010110100111 011101011 01100111110110 111001011101 10101001111110010 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 923 |
Words | 170 |
Sentences | 11 |
Stanzas | 3 |
Stanza Lengths | 6, 6, 6 |
Lines Amount | 18 |
Letters per line (avg) | 39 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 236 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 51 |
About this poem
Writing turns difficult memories into perhaps useful truths. Or a different kind of truth.
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"Tinkering" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/161377/tinkering>.
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