Poetry

They stand me up and sit me down,
I’m safe when they are on the ground,
Past fields, through woods, up canyons grand,
Oh, how I love the touch of land.
I know my feet have served me well,
Though there were times I know I fell.

And bikes and trams and trains and cars,
And ships and planes and flights to Mars
Are one side of the great divide
Between a ride and happy stride.

Forging a new form. I find this one works well to combine a visual scene with an abstract thought that it inspires. The form comprises five stanzas:

1. A sestet detailing a scene (two lines of trimeter and one tetrameter, repeating as aac bbc)
2. A couplet summarizing the scene (trimeter, i.e. keep it short)
3. A sestet re-inforcing the preceding stanzas and/or gradually introducing the abstraction (same meter as first sestet)
4. A couplet followed by 
5. A tercet – i.e. five lines that clarify the abstraction.

I’m going to try and repeat this form in a future post to see if it holds up :-). Share your thoughts in a comment here, or email me.

Powdered sugar driveways;
Slipping on the highways;
Crystal wonder flakes in motion;
Fallen in an hour
In a gentle shower,
Look around you: it’s an ocean.

Snow, snow, snow, everywhere,
Float and blow through the air,

Let the whiners blather
On that they would rather
Brave the summertime commotion.
Feel the mercy falling,
I can hear you calling
Through the layers of this notion.

Snow and love fall the same
From above in the name

Of the ever living,
And forever giving
Center of a heart’s devotion.

It’s your day to rise, your day to rise.

RISE!

There’s a wind that bites on the coldest nights
In the frozen lap of December,
And it leaves its marks of depressing truth
Everywhere that it blows. Remember

All the lonesome old, and the suffering youth
And the desperate cries of a mother
As she scrapes what once had graced her womb
From the street in the wake of another

Downpour of fire; every home’s a tomb
With its epitaph on the faces
Of the drenched who dried everything they had
In the rain, of all the places.

As a village dines on a morsel, glad
For the fact that their meal was bigger,
Don’t forget blood spilled, all of it unwilled
By that tot enticed by a trigger.

But we all rejoice for the time we killed
In our hot pursuit of pleasure,
Just don’t be ashamed of the tears you shed
They might be our only treasure.

(Take it down just a notch for the dead.)

There’s a wind that bites on the coldest nights
In the frozen lap of December,
And it leaves its marks of depressing truth
Everywhere that it blows. Remember.

Happy New Year!

A year had passed, but not a drop
Of rain had fallen down upon
The land of Makkah, and its crop
Did suffer. And its men were drawn

Toward their kind and noble chief,
Abu Talib, the Hashimi,
Whose charge it was to bring relief
To his ailing community.

He sat upon the dusty ground,
And listened till their tales were done,
Then gathered all the children ’round;
And when he saw his brother’s son,

Abu Talib let out a cry
Of pure, uninhibited joy,
To see the apple of his eye:
Abdullah’s one and only boy.

He held the child close to his breast
Then stood him ‘gainst the Kaaba wall
And gently proffered his request
To pray to God for rain to fall.

Muhammad raised his handsome face
And as he closed his blessed eyes,
He supplicated God with grace,
His heart beyond the cloudless skies.

Then in that moment, Mikail
Released the long-withheld decree,
And angel crowds rushed down to feel
The light of higher company.

A drop upon Muhammad’s cheek,
Then silence, as the heavens turned,
To rain upon a people weak
The mercy that their son had earned.

And thus the much awaited rains
Revived the Makkan hearts and crop.
I’d equal all the rains with tears
For something of that foremost drop.

It’s what makes a heart to steal away
Deep into the darknesses you find
There beneath the layers where they play,
Demons find a way to trick your mind.

Don’t give up on what you feel inside
Beating ‘gainst a chest that has no worth
If the sound of every beat has died,
Time to give another beat its birth.

All that matters is what you think of
Him who thinks of you just all the time,
Even when you think you’ve had enough
Of that thought you ever thought a crime.