Tuesday Poetry

[lokei]

Time + Distance

by Leslie Monsour
The tea you pour is black and strong.
It doesn't taste like tea to me;
I must have been away too long.

It isn't jasmine, spice, oolong;
It tastes like an apology—
This tea you pour, so black and strong.

Where's that old fork with the bent prong?
What happened to the hemlock

Comments

[sg_betty]

I like that very much! What is a villanelle? Um, other than that poem... Specifically, I mean... ;)

[lokei]

A villanelle is a kind of poem where the first and third lines of the first stanza are used as alternating last lines for the following stanzas, then reused in the quatrain at the end. A strict villanelle doesn't alter the lines at all, in a broken villanelle sometimes the wording is shifted a little. The trick is to try to make the lines mean something more or different every time they repeat. It's insanely hard to do, as it's a very constricted form, but I think they're beautiful. I've written precisely one. *wry grin* Sonnets, by comparison, are a walk in the park in perfect weather when everything in your life is going right, and a villanelle is like an AP exam on a day when you are recovering from flu and just broke up with your boyfriend

[sg_betty]

Wow--What a fantastic thing! I love the way it circles around itself! I am entranced...

[exdevlin]

This has got to be one of my favorite poems ever. It speaks of a sad female companion, and I can't even figure out who's the "protagonist" of the little story anymore, her, or the writer?