[Orwn Acra]

Your divan lies empty, Hafez.
Tonight you will spend it with others.

Should the face of this menu be less read
than that of your lover? End it with others.

“A wine’s nose as faint as your own.”
A good line. Though you penned it with others

in mind. Here’s mine: Pour it all out, Hafez.
A heart must be mended with others.

[Orwn Acra]

What it says in the title. The bar is called With Others. All comments are appreciated; those taking into consideration the audience and physical size of the menu even more so.

[O Eales]

Hi, I liked the way you've woven the bar's name into this piece with the internal rhymes in each of the second lines of the couplet. Ostentatious cleverness in a piece like this is one way to grab the intended audience. The first couplet is the most successful in my reading as both lines are end-stopped and contained one thought each. This approach would seem (with some variation to avoid monotony) to be a good approach for a bar crowd wanting something with immediacy. Thus, I thought the enjambment in couplet 2 and 4 overcomplicate the sense and take away from the line and overall impact. I wonder if there's a way to simply these lines and still keep the approach you've taken. Good luck!!

[Carl Copeland]

I dig this mini ghazal, Walter. I had to google to get the pun on “divan,” while the metonymy of spending a divan rather than a night first irked and then tickled me. S2 is a hoot, but end what with others? And what does a person with a faint nose look like? Guess I’ll have to ask Hafez. This poem is too cool for my nits anyway. I hope you get more orders for menus.

[R. Nemo Hill]

This combines so many different approaches, from deep verse to deep scholarship, from deadly serious to coy, through the wiles of seduction all the way to wisdom-inflected advertising. As a multi-occasional poem it seems a miracle (as well as a fine recipe). From the standpoint of a bar patron, it would, for me, prove, the mythical fixed-point-of-contemplation-that-refuses-to-stand-still, simultaneously a beacon of sobriety and a half-drunken pole star, burning, yes, and tilting, yes, yes.

Cheers!
Nemo

[Rick Mullin]

It is very good, Walter. The kind of good that surmounts the goodness of mercifully short ghazals.

[Nick McRae]

This ticks the right boxes for me, minimalist and a little strange in the right ways. I don't have much else to add other than that I enjoyed it.

[Orwn Acra]

Thank you, all. This is the first poem I've written since Etymologies and after that perhaps too meticulously thought-out project I wanted to write something without thinking too much. Which is actually really hard. A special thanks to Nemo because I read a few pages of Magellan to put me in the right state of mind.

Hopefully the owner likes it and I can update with pictures!

[Jim Moonan]

.
I didn't want this to slip down without saying how good it is to think this would be written on the back of a menu of an establishment like With Others. I don't drink and I don't know the bar but the poem tells me exactly what the experience might be if I did and if I went.

It also led me to this song by Esperanza Spaulding.

.

[Tony Barnstone]

I like it. I feel the last lines need to be just a bit more precise. Sometimes the best comment on a poem is another one, so I give you this one with a similar image:


Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

BY W. S. MERWIN