Tag Archives: rhythm

Listen: cinquain

Listen.
Let the sound come;
as you sense this new song,
pretend you just developed ears,
and hear.

Listen.
The sensation
of experience finds you;
feel the music filling your bones
with light.

Listen.
What you’re hearing
isn’t just some symphony
composed of random, crashing waves
of sound.

Listen
to the heartbeat
underneath the octaves;
in that small space between the breaths
it sounds.

Listen.
Let the sound come;
if you let yourself sing,
you can alter the melody
of life.

09 FEB 2017

Share This:

Optimistic anapestics

When the world
is so full
that it fails
to react
to the tears
of a child,
it has lost
any hope;

and when cries in the night
go unheard and are lost
in the noise of the street,
we have shut out the light.

There is much that we don’t understand,
yet we claim that we know truth from lies.
With our words, we explain many things,
but the truth is that we are not wise.

If you look out your door seeing just friend or foe,
you will find battle lines in each new place you go;
and you’ll fight, wrong or right, without end ’til you die
without knowing real peace or true friendship at all.

Yet a smile will repair many wounds, and may bring back the lost
from the dark, foul abyss where they wander and suffer in pain;
and they may find their sense, and return to their lives once again.
If a small thing like that can restore humankind, do it now.

25 AUG 2003

Continuing the discussion regarding rhythm, here’s my latest exercise result – taking an increasing number of feet with the anapest foot (da da DUM) in progressive stanzas.

Share This:

The Width of a Circle

Each thing that starts must have an end;
for every wax there is a wend
that once begun, moves to its finish.
Every birth has bury in it.

Like the moon face cycles through,
and new leaves sprout, then leave the bough,
things initiate and finish,
come to light and then must vanish.

Thus is nature, likewise man:
we rise and fall in a life’s span
and fight against the start of dying –
constantly, ’til we die trying.

In this circle is no starting
or conclusion, loss or parting;
you find neither foot or head
but instead, peace and acceptance.

Each couplet in this poem demonstrates a different rhyme: perfect, near, eye, half, masculine, feminine, end and internal, respectively.

21 AUG 2003

Share This: