Winter is coming on, and I am feeling the pull to go inward, to explore new poetic forms.  This one I discovered on Robert Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog.  It is a French form called a lai.  It’s good for me to get back to the anxious thrill of writing something for the fun and playfulness of it, and not simply because there are words knocking at the back door of my head asking to be let out.

It’s 9 lines.  The 5-syllable lines (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8) are rhyme A, and the others are 2 syllables and are rhyme B.  Here goes:

Either moon or frost
has whitely embossed
the field.
I wake, having crossed
the sea of sleep, tossed,
concealed
within my own lost
ark.  Now, waking’s cost.
I yield.

Hmmm.  Perhaps I ought to have been a little more intentional about choosing rhymes instead of diving in head first and letting the rhymes find me.  Nah.  That was fun.  Sort of like a tanka, but with the added imperative of rhyme.  And that happy little skip in the last lines of the triads could be used comically or very seriously, I think.  I started with the first thing that jumped into my head, so I was stuck with -ost as my major rhyme.  Initially I typed “grass” instead of “field,” but was limited by that rhyme.  Now that’s an exercise to wake me up.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  The artistic power of limits
2.  Colored pencils
3.  Warm rug for winter
4.  Cleaning the attic
5.  Civility

Beauty All Around Us.