The Apostrophe Blog
My narrative poem in syllabics, “Old, New, Broken, Blue,” was published in the Traditional Form issue of Blast Furnace, Volume 2, No. 2 in Spring of 2012. The pattern is this: Each stanza has lines bearing five syllables followed by a final line of two beats.
Old, New, Broken, Blue
Everyday, our blues
blew, operatic
trills in triple time
with every attempt
at tangible, wed
-locked talk.
You, the liar, washed
my mouth with soap. While
I, recidivist
smoker, lit up stubs,
studying them blue
until you doused each
blaze and dowsed for drink
instead.
Inevitable,
light came—the willow,
its dithery leaves
and branches bowed till
one limb broke inside
our parenthesis
of pain.
Blue note to this tale?
You fled.
Following that, our
correspondence grew
tattered, your ballads
belated and blue.
Funny
to think, after all
this time, I duly
divined, expected
really—we’d finish
our days side by side
in those nursing home
rockers, tilting toasts
to Rufus Wainwright’s
version of Leonard
Cohen’s “Hallelujah”
instead.
Photo by Jonathan Billinger
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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