Amateur poetry writing for fun

As with many things when we first start them, writing poetry is difficult at the beginning but then it gets easier with practice. A great way to start is with ‘Limericks’ which are easy to remember and lack real seriousness and can form a song on occasion too (but sometimes they contain bawdy or obscene verses). Limericks are beneficial in helping to understand structure with just five lines of verse and the first, second and fifth lines rhyming together. The fifth line is like a punch line and has a twist or a ‘sting in the tale’. The best limericks incorporate a large an element of word play and poetic riddles with the rhyme.
The first line of the limerick will introduce a person by name or a well known a place which will establish the rhyme for the second and fifth lines. Example: “There was a young man from New York” or “There once was a girl from Vancouver”
This is one of the oldest limericks on record and many variations of it exist, mostly rude and rhyming with ‘tuck it’. But this was its original form:

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

So the first two lines rhyme easily and to start a limerick you just need to rhyme two words as in Maine and plain: ‘There was a young girl from Maine, Whose voice was exceedingly plain…’

It is possible to use the ‘Nantucket’ example as a template to write a limerick of your own. Repeat your attempt aloud to check if it scans correctly. Better still is to allow someone else here it because they will be able to help you to correct the way it sounds.