Hello friends,
Four poems this week, from four different constraints. Enjoy! (And if you do, please consider purchasing The Robots of Babylon — your support would mean a lot to me.)
SNOW (Anagrammed Lines, Univocalic)
Snow comforts old roofs or norms.
Forlorn crows don soft moor moss,
or lost monsoons crowd for forms.
Forsworn storms cool fond rooms.
Cold sorrow forms frost on moons.COFFIN (Palindrome)
Mood sad,
lost I
a wan, if focal, life.
We rot.
Some rust nail,
posed under,
nooses a crack —
cuts a stuck carcase,
soon red....
Nude,
so pliant, sure,
most ore we fill —
A coffin awaits,
old as doom.The following Shakespearean sonnets, “Annwn” and “Ghost”, explore interfaces between co-existing, complementary worlds. Each sonnet has a stanzaic pattern of 5-2-5-2. Moreover, the two poems have the same number of letters in corresponding words (i.e. the first word of each poem has two letters, the second word has five letters, the third word has three letters, etc.).
ANNWN (Sonnet)
At night, the woodland scatters lunar rays
astride that point where this world and the next
become each other’s shadows. In the haze,
a crooked wreath of branches frames a text
composed of living leaves and roses dead.
The Otherworld is written into ours
when, deep within its kingdom, ours is read.
The crawling fae beget themselves, like stars,
and slither up the roots of elder oaks
malformed, before the moonlight chisels flesh
with all the passion mortal lore invokes —
from beauties old as art to horrors fresh.
The other world is bled to yours and mine,
in forms of love and evil we design.
GHOST (Sonnet)
In death, you puncture darkness, never days.
Against this night, faint dust moves low and pale.
Occult, your phases flutter to our gaze.
I capture shapes in fleeting spells. I fail,
resigned to fathom shroud but never core.
How incomplete my essence that, alas,
your full return was missing from my lore.
Now strained, the After obfuscates your glass:
You witness me, yet brief is every view.
(Adjoining worlds are moonbeams trading light;
they mix our shadows, moving ever through.)
Your glimpses see me fey, my glimmer white....
How empty, vague we look in death; yet here,
I’m misty to your eye — just my veneer.