I just love nonce forms. Probably because I seem to be a master at creating them when I've intended to write a roundel, a rouneau, a sestina, or a villinelle. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

Curtal Haiku

Surprisingly, spring.

[This message has been edited by John Hutchcraft (edited May 09, 2008).]

I've invented the curt

. . . but it met with dismissal.

I've gone back and revised this. I think it is better than the original draft.


- The Watering Gate -

Two people stood atop a distant hill
I saw them as I left today from work
as soon as I had closed the wooden gate
behind me and had drunk a cup of water.
There was no place I really had to go,
and so I took my time. I didn’t run


the way I sometimes do – I often run
as if life were a race. But on that hill,
the silhouetted couple stood. I go
and come the same way every day from work,
taking for granted earth and sun and water.
Familiar things get lost. Sometimes a gate


will make me pause and think; a creaking gate
especially so, and sounds of things that run
like trickling brooks, that peaceful voice of water,
its liquid echo circling down a hill
by clouds that just released their burdensome work,
and like me, found the peace of letting go.


The lie of time says moments come and go
as fast as little lambs run toward a gate
in search of freedom. There is always work
enough to keep us feeling ‘on-the-run’.
The move toward pleasure seems to be up hill,
against the laws that govern moving water.


But nothing is alive where there’s no water
that’s troubled – living things must ebb and go.
Stagnation lies beneath a silent hill
of graves, behind the locking of the gate
of wrought iron coldness. Living things must run.
An idle body has no means to work,


to keep the spirit flowing. Life needs work –
and workers need a living well of water
to keep the heart from fainting as they run.
Recycling is the only way to go.
Our life’s a circle and each of us a gate
that God has set upon his lovely hill.


I bike to work near waterfalls that run.
They’re brisk and full of life and through the gate
I drink the sun-rise lilting on the hill.

I noticed when reading yours, Anne, that the first and last stanzas were the ones that stayed in my mind with the two people on the hill in the first stanza and the biking near the waterfalls in the last one while the narrator goes from and to work. Nice images.

Maybe the sestina form can be salvaged by expanding on Roger's invention of the "curtal sestina" of 6 lines, each ending in a different word, with the final 3 lines having the original sestina pattern.

Call it the "expanded curtal sestina" form?

And if the end words just happen to rhyme, call it a "rhymed expanded curtal sestina".


[Edited to provide an example of a rhymed expanded curtal sestina.]

Wine and Truth

There's wine enough to help the world look right.
Our flesh though proves the worms will get their way,
But we ignore that now since we can say
We love the beauty of the stars tonight,
Though when we reach for wisdom in our books,
The pages crumble while the demon looks.

Perhaps we are not right to go this way,
Since some say we are lost in this dark night
Though ancient books still hint some angel looks.



[This message has been edited by Frank Hubeny (edited May 24, 2008).]

Frank,

This a quite lovely. I really love the opening line. I was listening to a book, "The Power of Now" (which I have mentioned several times recently - sorry if I sound like a broken record), and the narrator mentioned how much more violent the world might be if people did not have their various medications, sedatives and alcoholic mixtures to soothe the savage beast within. The author believes that humanity has a general collective insanity going on because we don't know "who we are" and are addicted to creating scenarios in our minds - unable to allow our minds to ever stop thinking (perhaps that is the bottomless pit). Anyhow, back to your poem. I like the ideas expressed in it.

Warm regards -
Anne

Thanks, Anne. I'll have to check out The Power of Now.

The more I think about the extended curtal sestina, the more I wonder if it is much improvement on the sestina except for being shorter.