Europe — a Heritage

While devising deliverance, river of light

is alarmingly, musically misty in flight.

Like a mystical madrigal brilliant from sun

look at blasting and lasting, the frill falling down.

Will you listen oh lilting one, madly oh merry

all over the messenger mock and not tarry.

You are locking your laughter while singing a height

to be always delectable, midnightly bright.

For a flanging me fearlessly, flaying delight

to forlornly, mysteriously slippery steep night.

Oh my rose, oh the river, oh roaming alone

ah the links are deserted, delinquent in stone.

My mellifluous Melisande, Hellespont lost

in maleficent mystery soften to tossed.

Were desirous debacle colloidally cold
will collapse for invincible, boldly to gold.

31 Poems in 31 Days (from Poewar / Writer's Resource Center). Prompt: a poem using metre. (This is anapestic tetrameter.)

Also submitted for dVerse Meeting the Bar: Verbal Cubism. We are asked to use poetic devices but fracture meaning and grammar a la Gertrude Stein and others.  Not a type of poetry I much enjoy reading, but it was fun to do. It wasn't so hard to fracture meaning. As anyone who knows me woud appreciate, getting rid of grammar was MUCH harder for me, but I managed it occasionally. 

The title came afterwards, just because some of the references are European. That part of my heritage interests me a lot less than the Asian and Australian, so I thought I might acknowledge it for once.

Observing Line and Metre (Non-Diverse)

After a discourse on line and metre, Gay at dVerse Form For All — Prosody invites us to take a few lines of our own free verse and rewrite them in iambic feet of any line length — noting that unrhymed iambic pentameter is called blank verse. (I admit, she said we could include a few anapests.) Well, I tried. I thought it might fix some languishing draft that wasn't working yet, but it did not improve any of them! Instead, a new piece:

Iambic feet and pentametric lines

will make my verses blank; is that not so?

Well, blank means only that they are unrhymed

(and following that metre, as I’ve said)

but many poems gallop to this beat

and solemn topics rollick jollily

in inappropriate cheerfulness of pace.

There’s more to poetry than may be found

in repetitions of de-DA-de-DA,

in lines of even length, in perfect count

of syllables in alternating stress.

I like a sonnet, but a haiku too

is poetry I think — indeed, insist!

And as for this, my friends, it’s doggerel
(also a piece of fun to start my day).


PS When it comes to metre, this is my favourite reminder:

Remember this verse:

Iambic feet are firm and flat                                                             - / - /

and come down heavily like that

Trochees dancing very lightly                                                        / - / -

Sparkle, froth and bubble brightly.

Dactylic daintiness lilting so prettily                                               / - - / - -

Moves about fluttering rather than wittily

While for speed and for haste such a rhythm is best                    - - / - - /

As we find in the race of the quick Anapest.

(Source unknown)