Four Poems

Hello friends,

Four poems this week, including a brand new sonnet. Enjoy! (And if you do, please consider supporting my work by purchasing either The Robots of Babylon or my new omnibus edition Knit Ink (and Other Poems).)

Alternatively, buy me a coffee on Ko-Fi!

This first poem is a triolet that repeatedly anagrams a line from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (“The nightmare Life-In-Death was she”):

ANAGRAM-TRIOLET FOR COLERIDGE

The nightmare, life in death: Was she
the sea? Mild feathers hang in white.
Marine faith hands the light we see.
The nightmare Life-In-Death was she.
Ah, what things sail? The men die free —
I, wreathed the same, in ashen flight....
The nightmare, life in death: Was she
the sea? Mild feathers hang in white.

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Two palindromes:

THE CITY (Palindrome-Haiku)

Go flat, urbanised....
A cradle here held arcades
in a brutal fog.

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THE DOCK (Palindrome)

A dock.
Sudden ways, 
tides.... 
I arose,
so raised 
its yawned, dusk coda.

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This final poem, a Spenserian sonnet in iambic pentameter, is a chronogram. In a chronogram, the letters of the alphabet are assigned their Roman numeral values: I = 1, V = 5, X = 10, L=50, C=100, D=500, and M=1000, with all other letters equal to zero. The purpose of a chronogram is to commemorate an event by composing a text whose total Roman numeral value adds up to the year of the event.

In this sonnet, each line adds up to 119. The total Roman numeral count is thus 119 x 14 = 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London.

GREAT FIRE OF LONDON (Chronogram-Sonnet)

These triple sixes strive for beastly night.
Their toxic fever rises. Where the spire
of Paul exalts its visions, ghosts of white
explore their living sores — before the fire.

The sphinx of revolution split us prior;	 
then, waxen sickness bit our riven skins.
Here, lifeless grievers weave a thriving pyre;
grotesques with holy texts relive their sins.

The exorcist arrives. The rite begins.
One furtive verse ignites the taverns’ wicks —
to nix the sickness born in savage inns.
Flux, vex this hex of Sixteen Sixty-Six!

The blaze invites a sprite to blitz the pox.
A phoenix heaves its wings through burning rocks.