rhyming verse

  • The Sunday Poem: Working Late

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 2 Comments

    Birds stud the late night lot, move like skipping stones.
    The bi-illumined trees huddle parking lights, dance
    the empty parking spots, waltzing without parts, alone.

    We click, we clack, we open, close, liquid crystal glows.
    We do the work we love, the love is like a trance.
    Birds stud the late night lot, move like skipping stones.

    The stairwell window’s open. The breeze is cold and stone.
    The smokers huddled there and overlooked by chance
    the empty parking spots, waltzing without parts, alone.

    Last lights are off. Hallway’s dim. The music of alarm tones.
    We promised not to stay so late, not to see sunset’s hands
    scatter birds, the late night lot, moved like skipping stones.

    But it works. Assembly is complete. The work, it can be shown,
    a tiny victory; a dinner lost, traded for the midnight glance
    at empty parking, spouse waltzing without partners, lonely.

    We move like skipping stones through dances grown
    To dreams; we work for dreams we only hope enhance.
    We stud the late night lot. We move like skipping stones
    past empty parking spots. We waltz our parts, and do not dance alone.

  • The Sunday Poem: From Kabul to Kandahar

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 1 Comment

    …The highway between Kabul and Kandahar was supposed to be a success story. Completed in 2003, it has instead become a symbol of all that plagues Afghanistan: insecurity, corruption and the radical Islamic insurgency that feeds off both.

    —Aryn Baker, Time Magazine, Oct 31, 2008

    “This is my road,” Saboor says: a dust
    Track gone the long way through the desert rocks.

    He drives the bus, two times a week, trusting
    Life and face to dirt he smears across

    His lips, a beard to baffle Taliban.
    He wears mechanic’s clothes: a claim the road

    Then makes on him, a thieving in the sand,
    The way last week the robbers burst and stole

    The crates with chickens, goats a-leash, the wealth
    That masquerades as dirt itself, the greens.

    I ask him, does he fear insurgent’s stealth,
    The bark of guns, the bullet’s code, the dream,

    When east Sarobi’s tea shops dish fruit cold and sweet,
    Pomegranates, porcelain plates, nuts and honey treats,
    The scent of lamb in stew, the simmering of the meat –

    He shrugs. Stolid, fleet. He says, “This is my road.”
    It is a dust track where the accent makes the meaning.

  • The Sunday Poem: Departures

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 1 Comment

    Life is made of departures:
    The passage from the dark
    The moment of weaning’s sharp
    Longing, frantic gestures.

    Balloons slipping out of hands.
    A dog’s last stiff-legged sleep.
    Kisses in a closet, the deep
    Fear there, the moments grand.

    The move from maiden name
    And the way she feels once
    Delivered. A man who hunts
    Regrets, and finds just blame.

    Life is made of departures
    And occasional desperate returns

  • The Sunday Poem: When Is a Rhyme a Rhyme?

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem

    I am here in Austin for AGDC, after a difficult day of travel. My last-ditch attempt to make it to Rudy’s for some BBQ before they closed missed by 20 minutes thanks to various flight delays. So here I sit with Sonic cherry limeade, melancholy, a Marriott substituting for a garret, to write a Sunday poem for you… 😉

    When is a rhyme a rhyme? A pair of words
    Vibrating twain and twin, a homonym
    A scanty, scarcely fraction time, a blur
    Of vowels assonancing on a whim…
    Half verb, the penult, higher ante, quill
    That sometimes speaks in halves and sometimes sprung,
    And in the clumsy piling on of syll,
    The ables and alliterate undone.
    Is all it is the music? Nothing else
    applies? The quatrain’s break, the plosive sound,
    The prayer on the couplet’s open verse?
    The sense of it, the consonance profound?
    The algorithm elegant, the twinning still sublime,
    Is it still a poem, if we forget to rhyme?

  • A poetry lesson for Bartle

    Hours Categories Reading
    Comments 19 Comments

    Richard Bartle has a little piece on the rhyming structure of this lovely poem by Carol Ann Duffy.

    Mrs Schofield’s GCSE

    You must prepare your bosom for his knife,
    said Portia to Antonio in which
    of Shakespeare’s Comedies? Who killed his wife,
    insane with jealousy? And which Scots witch
    knew Something wicked this way comes? Who said
    Is this a dagger which I see? Which Tragedy?
    Whose blade was drawn which led to Tybalt’s death?
    To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu? And why?
    Something is rotten in the state of Denmark – do you
    know what this means? Explain how poetry
    pursues the human like the smitten moon
    above the weeping, laughing earth; how we
    make prayers of it. Nothing will come of nothing:
    speak again.     Said by which King? You may begin.

    Sez Bartle,

    Maybe I’m missing something, or I’m not reading this with the right internal accent, but calling this “rhyming” is a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?

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