hunting for hedgehogs

hunting for hedgehogs is quite hungry work:
digging in the dankness and delving in roots;
it is enticing to imagine an igloo of rice
smothered in soysauce and sautéed in ghee
or legumes with limejuice liberally applied.
to be honest, these hedgehogs are hardly as nice:
they’re chewy like cardboard and crunchy like nuts.
their prime cuts are paltry, such puny old meat
hardly befitting the butcher to bring out his knife.
yet their flesh is well-favoured in far eastern lands;
a decadent delicacy of dubious tradition.
some say that the skin is suspiciously akin
to that of a human who hunts hedgehogs by night.

(this poem is an exercise in writing alliterative AngloSaxon-style verse, in the "syzygy of dipodic hemistichs" (!) mode of epics like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Props to The Ode Less Travelled, where these exercises can be found)

Rain
in October the weather
sprouts waterlogged bricks;
city streets dunked in water
like naughty witches;
the sodden verge; flooded weeds
in the sky-sucking sewers
and storm drains draining rain from
soggy clouds overhead.
do you really believe all
the rain falls back up
into the sky when it dries
off my trouser leg?

(this poem is an exercise in writing syllabic "haiku"-style verse, alternating lines of 7 and 5 syllables per line, props to The Ode Less Travelled)