This poem came out of the April 2, 2013 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired and sponsored by Anthony & Shirley Barrette. The form is forked parallels, a type of Egyptian verse.
forked parallels: I like this. I gather that the name refers to the parallel structure of the 2nd and 3rd lines of most of the stanzas:
For it turned out that the spells to fly through the sky could only be written by humans with thumbs, could only be cast by Bast's chosen creatures.
And interesting that this is a semantic/syntactic parallelism, unlike the phonological parallelisms (rhyme, alliteration, assonance, &c.) basic to European traditional verse forms, but very like the parallelism used in another Afro-Asiatic language, Biblical Hebrew:
Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill?
He whose walk is blameless and who does what is righteous.
who speaks the truth from his heart and has no slander on his tongue.
who does his neighbor no wrong and casts no slur on his fellow man.
You're right on the mark with the analysis of forked parallels. Sorry I forgot to include the reference for that, it's linked now. Having looked up that material while researching the Shu, I'm likely to use it for the originating cultures as well.
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For it turned out that the spells to fly through the sky
could only be written by humans with thumbs,
could only be cast by Bast's chosen creatures.
And interesting that this is a semantic/syntactic parallelism, unlike the phonological parallelisms (rhyme, alliteration, assonance, &c.) basic to European traditional verse forms, but very like the parallelism used in another Afro-Asiatic language, Biblical Hebrew:
Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary?
Who may live on your holy hill?
He whose walk is blameless
and who does what is righteous.
who speaks the truth from his heart
and has no slander on his tongue.
who does his neighbor no wrong
and casts no slur on his fellow man.
(Psalm 15:1-3, as analyzed here)
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