This month’s theme: “Where I Am: Poems of Place”
11/27 • Traditions
There will be nutmeg feather cake and aspirin dosed preemptively before we gather. Make no mistake: there will be nutmeg feather cake before the day is done. We’ll gladly break all barriers of sound as we decree: there will be nutmeg feather cake and aspirin dosed preemptively.
Because traditions repeat, I wanted to use a repetitive form. This is a triolet—with two initial lines that repeat and a few other lines that rhyme with them.
11/28 • Lost
Our loudest voice is silent
around the dinner table—
his ebullient good cheer
in memory
threadbare and faded.
Desiccated columbines
stand in the garden corner
all winter.
On his fifty-first birthday
a blizzard whistled outside—
I struggled for the first time
awakening
to a cold new world.
Desiccated columbines
stand in the garden corner
all winter.
Each Thanksgiving we gather
I remember our birthday—
the boat drifts away from shore
carrying years
of celebration.
Desiccated columbines
stand in the garden corner
all winter.
I’ve used the structure of boketto for this poem, while adapting it to my own intended meaning. As an invented form that incorporates haiku (or senryu) and tanka, boketto is intended to express the now—a single moment in time. However, I’m looking into both the unfolding present and the past here. According to creator Walter J. Wojtanik, “boketto consists of two stanzas, one of five lines (30 syllables – 7, 7, 7, 4, 5) and a three-line stanza (17 syllables – two seven syllable lines and a three-syllable line which becomes a refrain if a string of boketto are written).”
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Interesting work. Lovely.
Great work here