Category: Stories

Sometimes it’s story time. Now and then I’ll share a short story here, some of my own, and links to stories of others.

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Around the Table

Whether dinner is meatloaf or stew,
Or roast chicken a fork can cut through,
Or a salad of greens fresh with dew,
In a basement or room with a view:
The cuisine and the view don’t much matter
As long as I’m ‘round table with you.

(One thing I realized today is that the content of my poems depends a lot on the form I decide to use. I have the day’s prompt, and sometimes I have a thought that I want to follow, but if I go to a certain form, my theme may completely change before I’m through, or if I don’t have a thought ahead, the form creates my “story.” That was certainly the case for this poem today, a “Hir a Thoddaid.” It’s a Welsh form, six lines. Lines 1-4 and 6 end with the same rhyme and have nine syllables. Line 5 is 10 syllables and there’s a rhyme toward the end of the line that’s repeated toward the beginning of the sixth line. Mine is the short /a/ in “matter” and “as.”)

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Different Language

Spanish in Guadalajara
Leans heavily on vowels in speech,
So when learning, one must beseech
The speakers to not overdraw
Vowels allowed by unwritten law.
It’s true the effect of this sound
Creates a most musical round,
So though tricky for ear to hear
Each word to make meaning more clear,
The language’s beauties abound.

(On Saturday we watched the young daughters of friends and I almost wrote a poem about the “different language” of a one-year-old. Then I was going to write about different language structures and how these structures affect understanding things in our lives, but that got too complex. So I didn’t get far with this yesterday. This afternoon I pulled up my source for different poetry forms and I found the “Decima,” a ten line poem that is used musically in Latin America. Each line has eight syllables and the lines follow this rhyme scheme: ABBAACCDDC

The form and the fact that it’s related to music made me think of our experience with Spanish while living in Guadalajara. And so you get this poem 😊 .)

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Form Friday: Cento

The light of the bright world dies with the dying sun;
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,
(But) there are more things in heaven and earth…than are dreamt of in your philosophy,
(For) all the shining lights in the heavens [God] will darken over you.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget.

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Line 1: “The night has a thousand eyes,” Francis William Bourdillon
Line 2: “The world is too much with us,” William Wordsworth
Line 3: “Fire and Ice,” Robert Frost
Line 4: Hamlet, William Shakespeare (parentheses and ellipsis added)
Line 5: Ezekiel 32:8a (parentheses and bracketed word added)
Lines 6 & 7: “Recessional,” Rudyard Kipling

(Last Friday, November 18, was Form Friday, and our prompt options were to do a Cento or a Blackout poem. Both are known as “found” poems because they use material from other sources. I decided to try a Cento, which borrows lines or phrases from other works and creates a new poem from them. I started with line 5–I read that this morning and it struck me as a fabulous concept for a story, and if not that, an interesting line for a poem. Then I went digging around for some other random lines that I remembered from poems, wrote them down, fooled around with them, and created something with a little sense. Beneath my poem is a list of my sources.

The only line I couldn’t figure out how to fit in was another bit of Shakespeare from The Merchant of Venice, and it’s so lovely that I’ll put it here: “Look, how the floor of heaven/Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.” Now THAT’S how I want to write.)

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Harmony

Entwined, our voices sound around the room,
Each tone a counter note of harmony,
Some high, some low, some light, some tinged with gloom,
But each important to the company.

The tendency to place a pedestal
And set one part or other on its top,
While pushing others out or under all,
Is habit that is difficult to stop.

Yet if we do not fight against this foe,
Delib’rately acknowledging the need
For every voice and talent high and low,
We’ll miss the beauty centered in our creed.

We’ll lose the chance to see the way our Lord
Can use our body whole to touch the world.

(The word “harmony” naturally made me think of music, and so I thought I’d work with a Shakespearean sonnet. I remember trying to help tenth grade students write these–they seemed so hard! I don’t like them when they’re too ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, but they don’t have to be. Not sure if I succeeded with this one, but I do enjoy the practice.)

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Network

My neighbor said birds like birdbaths
As much as seeds,
So in the midst of summer rays
The blaze recedes

From dim shadow under our tree,
Where water waits,
Fresh and cool, calling parched birds.
Mute words translate

Through airy avian network—
Cardinal, jay,
Mockingbird, robin, and thrasher—
All whir their way.

(Here’s a cool poetry form: the Dechnad Cummaisc–please don’t ask me to pronounce this!. It’s an Irish style made up of quatrains. In each quatrain, the first and third lines have eight syllables. The second and fourth have four syllables and an end rhyme. The final word of line three rhymes with the middle of line four.)

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Twins

“Are you sisters?”
“No,” we say,
“But you’re not alone.
We’re often asked that.”

I glance at my friend
Born across the continent;
She has a couple inches on me,
I have more years, and pounds.

But there’s something in our poise,
Our perspective,
Our way of engaging others,
That creates, I think,
The allusion to family.

Perhaps not twins,
But even twins
Are more dissimilar
​​​​​​​Than friends of the soul.

(Last Tuesday these phrases kept running through my head with this prompt, so I just went with another free verse. Sometimes that’s just what works!)

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Eye Contact

“Just trust in me,” sang Kaa the snake,
And Mowgli’s eyes grew round as cake;
The boa’s hypnotizing theme
Pled eye-to-eye full contact take.

To look into the eye, I deem,
Requires a strength that’s most extreme
If one expects to keep one’s soul
From getting lost in other’s dream.

For while one keeps the body whole
The soul is bound by one who stole,
With gleam of eye and mind’s heartache,
A bit of life one can’t control.

(Sunday the 13th’s poem borrowed a form used in the “Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyham,” better known as the “interlocking rubaiyat,” and found in a better poem, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening.” I’ll have to try that one again when I have more brain space. Enjoy!)

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Form Friday: Villanelle

The great dog Copper battles for his prey—
His growl is fierce, he’ll win this fight—
All must surrender to his sway.

He corrals his foe, holds it at bay;
I try to retrieve it with will and might.
The great dog Copper battles for his prey.

I grip the prey, but Copper’s away
With foe grasped firmly in his bite;
All must surrender to his sway.

At last I have hold and make headway,
And Copper tugs with ferocious delight—
The great dog Copper battles for his prey.

It’s impossible to avoid this fray
For Copper’s tail wags, his eyes are bright;
All must surrender to his sway.

The truth of his size never causes dismay;
He’s not concerned with his meager height—
The great dog Copper battles for his prey,
All must surrender to his sway.

The Great Dog Copper

I wrote this for Form Friday, November 11, and the choice was between a Sestina and a Villanelle. I chose the less daunting–the Villanelle 😄. If you’d like to know what a Sestina looks like, check out this description: https://www.writersdigest.com/…/sestina-6×6339-thats-math. You can also find out about the Villanelle through that site. A classic example of a Villanelle is Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”