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forms, forms, forms

While this section may be of most interest to people who like me enjoy learning about and using different poetic forms, there are also example poems here which I hope will entertain.

You can scroll this page to read about forms and see examples, or you can click to jump directly to the ones that you want:acrostics  ballad  ballade  blank verse  blues and other songs  chant royal  couplets  dizain  free verse  heptametric couplets  nonce and varied forms  old english metre  ottava rima  prose poem  quatrains  rhyme royal  sapphics  sestina  sonnet  unrhymed accentual syllabic pentameter  villanelle

Continuous Dance

Continuous dance, the soaring of the eagle.
Ordered dance, the orbed webs in the attic.
Negatives, the flip sides of the screen
That some see flat. All shimmers with charisma,
Ingests charisma as its party food,
Necessary snacks, naught more, or less,
Underscoring feasts upon the menu,
Offered to all creatures, humans too.
Undoubtedly the words of every guru
Supply a stanza to the holy paean,
Doubtless as importance-filled as pi
And as important as sun, wind, and sleet.
No dance, and no one guru, ever can
Comprehend one mote of the to-do
Ellipsing through the temporal-spatial arc.

 

Acrostics

A form in which the first letters of each line spell something

As do also the last letters of each line in double acrostics such as Continuous Dance.

 

 

Gold Rust

The time that comes when gold will rust
        is when I'll want to leave.

Let's argue then, enjoy now.
        I'd rather hug than grieve.

 

 

 

Ballad

Traditional style, telling a story in a number of short regular stanzas, often with a refrain.    top

 

Salvation and Belief

It's hard to find a crutch no church opposes.
The Church of Sigh Astrology bans Prozac:
why ease the path to where we push up roses?
Some chaplains pass the buck and bless the bushwhack;
they preach both Kill the White and Kill the Black.
God-sellers seems to thrive on human grief
and profit flogging fears that bring the flock back
and help them sell Salvation and Belief.

Sheep bleat that eating spareribs disses Moses,
that Durex pulled on Papal bulls is slack,
that talking blue dilates blue-stocking noses.
Instead of showing tent-show cures are quacks
their goat-like lectors stone girls on their backs,
and masticate what's left for ghoul relief.
God-sellers clamber into any sacks
that help them sell Salvation and Belief.

One can but wonder whether God supposes
that Her creation suffers, dying back.
While thinking mortals think She overdoses,
false deacons and fake preachers employ claques
purporting to instruct why we should tack
our star-crossed legs in step with those whose chief
desire is scaring us to buy their plaques
to help them sell Salvation and Belief.

God, preserve us from believing lies
and trusting liars' all-must-suffer brief!
Shine cleansing light through all God-sellers' racks
so they can't sell Salvation and Belief.

 

 

 

Ballade

Three stanzas each of eight or ten iambic pentameter lines along with a brief envoi,
with all three stanzas and the envoi ending in the same one-line refrain.

The envoi is a closing stanza dedicating the poem to a patron or summarising its main ideas.

François Villon and Dave McClure sometimes dedicate envois with a vocative-case first word, e.g. "claire!"    top

 

 

Mr. Colson

Does Lemuel Colson live on mountain tops?
I hope he does. No one has seen him here
in town for years. He loved me once, the vague
way old men love their daughter's child, with pride
and reservation, not too much. I must
have seemed a measly vessel to entrust
with his ideas and genes. He gave me once a book,
I have it still, with leather sides and black
inked words he wrote to guide my way. I read
them seldom now, and seldom page my way
into the printed words this Bible holds.

He loved me once, the old way proud men love
their daughter's child, without reservation;
perhaps too much. On visits I'd accept
some sweets, play with his lighter; soon I'd ask
when we could go. There's more that I would ask
him here today. Ask mountain tops.

 

 

 

Blank Verse

Unrhymed metrical verse, probably as old as rhymed verse.
The most common metre for blank verse is iambic pentameter, in which Shakespeare wrote most of his plays.    top

 

Marital Health Arts

When you oil a wrinkled gator
his scales don't shrink – they shine.
When you oil a wrinkled gator
his scales don't shrink – they shine.
And when you marry five times
your ring ain't sure to fit.

Red mosquitoes in the forest
bite like green ones in the dark.
Red mosquitoes in the forest
bite like green ones in the dark.
And the oftener you marry
it is still the same old skit.

All the padres and the mummers
and people who write plays
All the padres and the mummers
and people who write plays
can't change the fact that marriage
is only for the fit.

 

 

 

Blues and Other Songs

A variety of rhythms to be sung, or moaned.    top

 

Turning

Is the Rat still stranded half way up Mount Pisgah?
Do persimmons still turn sweet when kissed by frost?
Do the autumn leaves alert the hunted whitetail
or is everything we cherished gone and lost?

I've built houses and I've helped men burn down cities.
I have danced with women who have shown me grace.
The foreign ports have always seemed the prettiest
and I've gone downhill until I've found my place.

Do the Appalachians shimmer when the leaves turn?
Do the grey squirrels bury acorns they forget?
And does Hominy Creek remember where we buried
the crow, and is he resurrected yet?

I still sing the songs and still forget the lyrics,
remember street names and forget the towns.
I pray for mountain rain to cleanse the barracks
where we made the lightning thunder down.

I will lift my eyes to Pisgah where the clouds hide.
I will track the bear and boar through rhododendron.
I will seek the spring that no one's ever drunk from
and when I find it I will know I'm home.

 

 

 

Chant Royal

Exactly sixty lines: five eleven-line stanzas each ending on the same refrain line
and finally a five-line envoi.
Stanza rhyme scheme is a a b c c d d e d e;
envoi rhymes d e e d e

No rhyme word may be repeated.    top

 

 

Mistress

He walks
reluctant dog
through rain to a pay phone
to check how she spends Christmas Day
alone.

No crowd,
just her, her phone.
No spouse, no child's delight.
No prize. No party feast for four.
Alone.

He talks
half soaked, alert,
illumined by true love.
Wet rubber boots, dog left outside
alone.

At home
his wife puts kids
to bed, and says, “sleep tight”
and goes upstairs to take a call
alone.

 

 

 

Cinquain

Form invented by Adelaide Crapsey,
from "five lines"

The first line and fifth lines contain 2 syllables,
the second line contains 4,
the third line contains 6,
and the fourth line contains 8 syllables:
    2, 4, 6, 8, 2 syllables.

Metre and rhyme are not prescribed although iambics sound good.    top

 

Words to a Mood

Rolling it is now, and that is so nice,
think back on your first home; sunshine and rice.
Crouched in the shade gloom just out of the heat,
watermelon sliced red, salt on the sweet.

Chapped lips in winter, coal dust and ice,
bitter smiles cracking, slow bleeding hot spice.
The crunching of small bones, owls dining on mice,
the deaths of our mammas, those debts we pay twice.

Sex in a hammock, fights on the ground.
Thankful hosannas - palm sundaes abound.
Where is it all going? Where haven't we been?
Before the song dwindles, Son, sing it again.

 

 

 

Couplets

Set or sets each of two successive lines, usually rhyming and having the same meter and often forming a complete thought or syntactic unit.

Performance note: Words to a Mood sounded good when sung and played impromptu at Amsterdam's Bavaria Hoek bySon McGauley, blues singer and piano, and David Brown, clarinet.    top

 

Aye Robot

The features that attract me make me leave.
Admirer of the bourgeoisie and calm,
I seek their comforts while my instincts grieve
at how the passing, passive days embalm
adventures I imagine where I harm
the evil, help the hopeless, and enjoy
the caring. My mendacities employ
my days sleepwalking and my nights to stare
unseeing at the obvious: I toy
with being human but I cannot care.

 

 

 

Dizain

Ten lines rhymed a b a b b c c d c d.

Usually (though not by definition) iambic pentameter.

Note: All of the The Padre poems are dizains.    top

 

Emmench

Watching the cars pass:
lines of Mercedes-Benz SUVs
where the drivers if you won
first prize
really would be
footballers’ wives

but more often are dentists
driving themselves
to quasi wealth
and permanent frowns
by years
of fingering
other people’s mouths.

 

 

 

Free Verse

— Poetry "free" of rhyme and meter?
— Free of being any discernible form?
— Poetry professors debate this term endlessly.
— What's your definition?    top

 

Lemon Hill

The poor and lame climb up this hill when the fruit begins to grow.
The going blind watch from the shade and squint at April's glow.
When flowers finish blooming and the rain pails them away,
petals pour down darkling hills and pollen swims the bay.
In May the buds begin to swell, accelerate their slow
chill winter's start and form gold orbs absorbing sun in rows.

June's sun bakes shade from leafy trees where turgid spiders spin
the webs they lime to catch their prey that had its own chance when
down in the roots the fly-nests blew, and the buzz that blind men hate
teased sighted heads as flies laid eggs in eyes, to incubate.
July sees owners mend the wires delineating groves
and joke with wide-eyed pickers who're returning here in droves.

The healthy climbers harvest two to the blind or cripple's one
as all hands strive together in the sweltering August sun.
Hands reach up where the branches fork, and arms stretch down to throw
ripe lemons in reed baskets with a braggadocio
that helps them harvest money now, to live on when it's slow
and dulled eyes shine reflecting back when fruit began to grow.

 

 

 

Heptametric Couplets

Couplets whose lines each have seven feet.
Heptametric, the adjective of heptameter, seems to be poetic jargon as it is not in many dictionaries.

Edgar A. Guest (1891-1959), who is thought to have written some 11,000 poems, wrote his The Lay of the Troubled Golfer in heptametric couplets.    top

 

Their Jealous God

He snatches up the holiness of others,
builds bands of brothers up the like of which
the earth's not seen. Materialism smothers
the western world, impoverishing the rich.

The poor the rich have left outside to starve
get mileage from His motive words and carve
paths northward – up from Guatemala, Chad
and other governments in all things bad

except encouraging babies. Millions march,
including those disease and heavy metals
lay out and down along the way like petals
from tropic plants whose fruits feed bird and fish
and in return get passage for their seed.

He stokes survivors' urgency and need.
and gives the strongest poor the missing starch
their parents lacked to fight the first-world wish
that generations of them stay away.

The many millions march and many stay
the course, caught up in visions He has spun
in bulldozed jungles cooked by let-in sun.

With police dogs as their manna, oil their drink,
the poor consume stone paths and reach the gates
the rich erected; breach them. At the brink
their God applauds, and shows His teeth, and waits.

 

 

 

Nonce and Varied Forms

Forms which I made up or don't know the names of.

For example, Their Jealous God is a nonce form in iambi pentameter with a rhyme scheme without any name that I know: a b a b c c d d e f f g h h e g i i j j k l k l    top

 

Childhood's Inn

It was without relish that he disrobed the whore,
saw flash burns scarring flesh that had
ignited senior hearts and been a sign
of what the wretched Tigers wished to win.
"She'll live," he thought, turning attention
first briefly to the bearded dead
ambassador and then back to David.

David bled from bent-back fingers,
through the fingers. Bombs had found
here oh so many men by now, in meetings that were cause
of nothing but agendas acted on by agents
filling diaries for decades now it seemed.
The doctor stitched, staunched where the digits
joined, jammed iodine, juxtaposed
a nail against a naked joint.

The whore, Sri Lankan, wiped his eyes
and asked when Clarke had called to check.
"He hasn't," the doctor hesitated.
He wondered should the worst be told,
that neither would knighthood be Clarke's
nor were whores welcome at the wake
of reputation of the resident surgeon's favourite,
the writer who raised readers' minds
to Jupiter, jump-started juvenile brains,
inspired the Argosies of astronauts,
and gave the globe great pleasure
with more than HAL – this was Hell.

"It isn't fair," the whore said, fainting
half away and haltingly returning.
"He had it all, and less, and now these lies!"

The doctor thought the truth may never out,
remembered flights in twice forty books.
Could clandestine Clarke count
on amnesty, amnesia of the world?
Had he done nothing harmful? Was it hate
accusing him falsely of fancying boys?

The crime of pedophilia, so perverse
its practitioners should be paid in pain
and penalised with penitentiaries,
could Arthur answer his accusers?

The doctor hoped devoutly so.

"Here for forty years we've loved his yarns,
our people," the whore said, pathetically.
"Only one newspaper, nosing evilly
even hints wrong-doing. Wrongly!

"You've learned I am no girl!" he lapsed
back in the world of the internally injured.

"David, you're dying," the doctor said,
but softly, knowing sayings hurt.

The whore, not hearing, head back, hurried,
adding that Arthur actually was innocent,
was almost worshipped in Platonic ways.
"We, our people, knew him perfectly
as thinker, writer, wonderful being."

Night caught his words: "I never knew him as a man."

 

 

 

Old English Metre

A là Beowulf:  a caesura in the middle of each line creating half-lines of equal weight, with each half-line normally consisting of a phrase containing two stressed and two or more unstressed syllables. ("The basis of the metre is stress or accent, not the quantity nor the number of the syllables."[p.47, Introduction in BEOWULF, A Verse Translation by Michael Alexander, Penguin Classics, 1973.]).

Metre there also requires alliteration: "The rule is that the first letter of the first stressed syllable in the second half-line must also begin one of the two stressed syllables in the first half-line." [Ibid.]    top

 

Reincarnation Redux

The next funeral. A saxophone. The blues.
The things that we look forward to remember.
Amazing how a half note can amuse
a fire burned down to one fatigue-prone ember
or put it out. There is not much to choose
between the pyre and drowning if you're limber
or demented and accustomed to the pain
of these lives that keep on coming down like rain.

 

 

 

Ottava Rima

Stanzas each of eight iambic pentameter lines rhyming a b a b a b c c.

Lovely for book-length poems like the wonderful Byrne by Anthony Burgess.    top

 

First Autumn Days

Once upon a time, back when I knew muscat was what lived in the river behind the fields behind the house, there was a future that beckoned as only futures do. This particular future was mine, and I looked forward to it. Analysis would come later, with growing up and marrying and a vengeance. Now there was just the future.

The present, I got that for my birthday, didn't fit anymore. Someone close had died and I thought it was my fault though it happened far away. I didn't, really. Think about it. But I knew.

The sun shone anyway and right way through the forest edge where we kept losing the ball. The larger dog always found the ball and brought it back, sometimes days later, always wet. The sun burned the dew from the weeds and in April and September, sometimes October, we would tie our jumpers round our waists and looked for nuts and birds and animals. We found muscat tracks in the mud, and travels and futures in all the house's books, futures written so they flew past every time we looked in: Defoe, Carroll, Dickens; Dumas, Voltaire, Anna Sewell (lady authors had first names). Forests and books full of black bears seldom seen.

I met China, a missionary lady from there who came to visit one of my aunts, and didn't think to ask her which part. 'China' was enough to know. Still is, although I'm conditioned now to think I should think it shouldn't be.

I learned early that real life wouldn't teach me much. That's what it taught me. The beauty I found and find every day comes from nature sec and as distilled into books and paintings and music. We are the distillers; we think.

We are the distillers, we think. We wonder why it is 'sometimes' but 'every time' and think that's thought. Like others, I turn my 'thoughts' to provenance and teleology, and, like them, achieve nothing that affects berries, birds, animals, or China; achieve only long tortuous sentences. Maybe China is affected, but where in China?

The stillness of Jeanne d'Arc as she lies in Rouen. That's a future. They burned her. I know that. Usually don't think to ask who burned her. 'They' is enough to know. They used up their futures. A cloud of meaty smoke.

When the wind comes down from Normandy and the leaves turn tail and it's impossible even for the larger dog to find the wet ball, we jump into our sweaters and think of futures in which we migrate. Endless sand beaches occupy us but not really, considering how triste the tourists look doing the Sanibel shuffle in perfect weather all the daze of their unoccupied lives. They don't think about it, but they know.

We tune our noses in the autumn wind. We sing of futures, and wonder why mayonnaise, unlike back when, now leaves a dirty aftertaste that muscat only dissipates, not kills.

 

 

 

Prose Poem

Like poetry (intense, sculpted) but without line breaks.    top

 

Tenet Farming

'I am old,' says the Parson, 'and partial to speech.
The noise allays my own fears
that there's not all that much to the tenets I preach
although they've sustained me for years.'

 

 

 

Quatrains

Verses consisting of four-line sets that usually rhyme alternately.    top

 

Twixt

We live in fiction, often unaware
reality is different. Lonely days
can seem significant when you can share
perceptions of them with a shifting haze
of set locations peopled by a maze
of characters invented for a plot
whose twists seem real although you know they're not.

Nor rhyme nor royal reason can surpass
reality for strangeness. Someone dies
before achieving anything. A mass
is said upon what living were called lies
yet now are seen as sainthood in disguise.
A new church symbol gains a megawatt
of blessed illumination for the knot

tied twixt the tithers and the simply tired.
Where science is religion both are mute.
When one expires its relics are admired
by adherents of the other, their pursuit
(that had seemed glorious when there was dispute)
of glory hindered by a niggling doubt,
suspicion no one knows what we're about.

 

 

 

Rhyme Royal

Chaucer is credited with inventing rhyme royal, the first English stanza form: iambic pentameter with the end-rhyme scheme a b a b b c c.    top

 

Arc Tangent Stock Lists

(Excerpt from The Arc Tangent, a really long poem/stage play about a trip in space which itself is not all in Sapphics, just these stock lists.)

Information services. Tepid talk shows.
Motor homes and laxatives. Totems. Kitchens.
Toy daggers. Tongue-and-groove boardwalks.
        High-tension cables.

Whisky, footwear, magazines, landfill markers.
Recreation vehicles. Cheese-like products.
Mouthwash, cling film, nicotine patches.
        Newspaper leaders.

Earthnuts. Mopeds. Flowering deadly nightshades.
House pet decoys. Lubber's holes. Luau hand gloves.
Baseball teams and spectacles. Shaving lotions.
        Imported health foods.

Dental cleansers, paper for graphic repro-
duction, comms, and packaging. Discount drugstores.
Household products, torsion bars, snack food wrappers.
        Inner-space music.

Bottled spirits, bandages, random snuff stains.
Water filters, guaranteed philtres, aspirin.
Nametags, toppings, electrical razors. Plasters.
        Broadcasting channels.

Jury packings. Sorcerers-leather jockstraps.
Bottled lab-grade guinea-pig droppings. Plus fours.
Bosom holders. Athletic clubs and blown-glass
        carrier pigeons.

Mail drops, sex guides, flattery pills, varied storefront
chapels. Hot-air carriers, news desk clippings.
GAP's own best-buy casual and active put-ons.
        Molecule crystals.

Marked up toy-boy swaddling clothes. Coughing tablets.
Martyrs' raiment. Cleansers for king-size wreck rooms.
Charcoal embers. Precipice-razing robots.
        Fabrics and wine kits.

Condoms, cant terms, guaranteed temper tantrums.
Hair-care helpers. Passenger charges rebates.
Gourmet foodstuffs. Peppermint odour chasers.
        Televised prize-fights.

Railway rail ties. Industry gases. Jellies.
Information quality downtime. Ciders.
Petrol-driven lawn mowers. Highway guard-rails.
        Silencer pistols.

PlayMore liver transplant kits. Brigitte B films.
Forest products, aeroplanes. Poppycock and
eye-care lens guards. Photograph retouch programs.
        Discounted good buys.

Geothermal risible neon church pews.
Basketball pumps, Gatorade, wholesale inlets.
Wicker baskets. Feminine hygiene products.
        Burnishing supplies.

Mail-hole diggers, casseroles, grocer's aprons.
Salad dressings, leveraged-buyout books and
liquor. Levis. Chewing gum. Retail outlets.
        Pork and beans. Bitters.

Salsa onions, nitrogen oxide, nachos.
Chill down tank tops, parts-and-equipment fire sales.
Black Jack Daniel's, publishers' chapbook font sets.
        Bank-exec defaults.

Service stations. OneHandy chain saws. Tooth caps.
Seamen's turn-ups. Property rights and water.
Merchandising. Cricket pitch shower covers.
        Flea collars, Drano.

Seatless blue jeans, washable skin-tight T-shirts.
Rubber jumpsuits, AbstinenceOnTime guide books.
Midwatch lotto, rational passion plungers.
        BetteD sequins.

Refined sugar. Industry rip-off standards.
Automotive products and pension scandals.
Internet transmissions and censors' agents.
        Library headsets.

Entertainment. Cereals. Marriage scrapbooks.
Health care products, blue jeans, detergent powders.
Agriculture coupons for soil bank misuse.
        Pellets for crack heads.

Spacey lawyers' "Habeas Corpus" phrase books.
Backup tape drives. Flora and fauna pressings.
Rebel Irish knee-cappers. Hard-up software.
        Financial service.

Fat-man feel-good athletic footwear. Anvils.
StayPress processed poultry-like products. Nose rings.
Lace-ups, Legos, prosthetic clothing. Raincoats.
        Virtual-life jars.

Water coolers. Broadcasting content. Shovels.
Rough-trade snowploughs, toilet equipment, pipe dreams.
Collard-green scent. Handy Wipes. Soul food extract.
        Chilli dogs. Car keys.

Ticked-off muses. Botham's old batting helmets.
Track shoes. Hubcaps. Ferris wheel season tickets.
Fast-food colours, videoed drive-by-shootings.
        Pacemakers, pizza.

 

 

 

Sapphics

Four-line stanzas where the first three lines each consist of two trochaic feet then a dactyl then two more trochaic feet.

The fourth line in each stanza is a dactylic foot, followed by a trochaic foot.    top

 

A Short Piece

Of night sleeps I remember none are short
as this one, stopping on the second line
of counting sheep to stare into the dark.
Outside, a baby's screaming like a cat
which I pretend's the other way around
and blank out themes I wrestled with in "Piece Work"

One: killing to save peace can only work
for spans of time that are extremely short.
A chamber of the sort that takes a round
expels a load that tracks a laser line
from whom I'd thought my neighbour towards the cat.
My eyes can trace the red glare through the dark

into the trees. The morning starts off dark
and worsens as I walk my way to work.
On a tree I see a poster for a cat
a child is missing, and another short
note penned below it with an ending line
that the cat and child no longer are around.

My partner, here since evening, takes a round
of questions. Answers leave us in the dark
as they must for now; she only has the line
I'd given her when she came into work.
The lines of customers are growing short
and thinking comes in quietly as a cat.

And we. who once were proud of how we'd cat
around, when times were easy, have come round
to valuing what's important now we're short
of options, and we rage against the dark
together, as if rhetoric could work
a miracle. We want a party line.

"Peace at all costs" and "Do not cross this line"
compete, and we consider if the cat
survives its boxing; we ask whether work
will be an option if bad forces round
upon us and extinguish peace. The dark
unites us and we cut our whining short.

We will work with weapons for the coming round
of vigilance, hold lines against the dark,
ensure our war's successful. Peace is short.

 

 

 

Sestina

Six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoi.

The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a fixed order as end words in the other stanzas and also recur in the envoi.

The order of end words (assigning the capital letters A B C D E F to the end words in the first stanza) is A B C D E F, F A E B D C, C F D A B E, E C B F A D, D E A C F B, B D F E C A T.

The envoi, the short closing stanza in the sestina (and also in the ballade), dedicates the poem to a patron or summarises its main ideas.

The envoi in the sestina ends with E C A or A C E, and B, D, and F may occur within the lines.

I think that sestinas look good in blank verse.    top

 

Soliloquy of Spider's Saturday Fly

The spiders' fly of yesterday has dried,
hangs by the bulk of Wednesday's harvest fly,
and I'm uneasy: standing, being eyed
by the waiting spider crooning, 'Come in, die.'
The spider's song, too soft for sapiens ears
jars memories in the blackbird, makes it squirm.
Ignoring all of us the blackbird rears
his head to listen to a lowly worm.
The human in the garden chair has seen
the bird, me and the spider, and he writes
what his imagination brings to keen
observant powers he thinks his muse ignites.
Allowed to watch us sing and sigh and sup,
he and his reader think he makes this up.

 

 

 

Sonnet

Fourteen-line poem usually in iambic pentameter, often with a b a b c d c d e f e f g g end rhymes.
You can (and people do) say much more about sonnets; for example, that sonnets are dialectical constructs. There is more about this at Sonnet Central's Basic Sonnet Forms.    top

 

Marie Louise

Marie-Louise, we have followed spring north so fast we've won;
outstripped it, and shiver together among the naked trees,
budding but no more, a haze of colour, bark.
Promises. No pageantry of blossoms. No surging surf
like that we stood in, braced but not unpleasantly,
yesterday or thereabouts, south of Valencia.

The days are longer here than there: more hours, less sun.
The orange, unique in bearing fruit and flowers at once,
knows to keep its roots: we travelled north alone
although blossoms kept us company until Lyon, and leaves
half-out half shaded our high speed climb through the Ardennes
until Liège where Winter's edge of siege held fast.

I am freezing but clearheaded while you hibernate.
I am warm and something muddled when you wake me,
bringing each other frozen orange juice and coffee,
trying to be two people as one at once as once,
uniting Northern light with Southern heat while hearts
beat to separate rhythms. The orange tree is unique.

 

 

 

Unrhymed Accentual Syllabic Pentameter

A form used so well in the book Spoon River Anthology (1915) by Edgar Lee Masters.

The Oak and Mimosa collection in Sometimes in Balance is in this form.    top

 

It Takes Two to Tango

Those who've seen you dance together knew:
each tango step you shared supports the state
of the magic love that lights your lives anew.

We lift our glass of wine, champagne or brew
to toast bright joys you can anticipate.
Those who've seen you dance together knew.

Your tangos set the mood of midnight blue
that sparks this evening when we celebrate
the magic love that lights your lives anew.

Together you paint all the shades of blue
except the lonely blues you've shown the gate.
Those who've seen you dance together knew.

There is great pleasure being with you two
because of the warm joys that emanate
from the magic love that lights your lives anew.

Your wedding sends the signal that you're due
to dance together through the days that wait.
Those who've seen you dance together knew
about the magic love that lights your lives anew.

 

 

 

Villanelle

French form whose 19 lines may be of any single length.

Divided into six stanzas; it has two rhyming words and two lines that repeat in various set places.    top