Today my newest poem on Coffee house Writers posts. The posting rules for Coffee House are slightly different for the poetry department. In the poetry department there are two types, the type I am is devoted to poetry and rarely post else. Coffee House is devoted to growth of their writers. So, the poetry department that I am a part of does a weekly assignment. A challenge if you will. The weeks that you post you are required to at least attempt the assignment, and to comment on other attempts. This way we grow, we learn.

I have written free verse my whole life. I am I think comfortable, overly so sometimes, with free verse. I love the lack of restrictions on my writing.

The poet ee cummings used a lack of following the syntax rules to separate his poetry from the mainstream. I am in no way comparing my poems to his, but it was an argument that I used in high school when the teachers wanted me to follow all of the poetic rules. I have learned the rules since, because it is easier to break rules if you know them. In high school though, I was not worried about the rules of what I was writing. It was a coping mechanism. I was writing pure emotional purge, without care of what I was truly putting into the world. It wasn’t until later, when I was safer, that I started to consider how to improve my words.

So I am thankful now to attempt the challenges to improve. A good many of them are new forms. As poets, we often stagnate in single forms because they become easy to write. (The reason why I have been taking on Haikus lately.) I hate stagnation. Poetry should be fresh. A new view.

This week the assignment was a Ghazal poem.From the internet search “Ghazal
(Pronounciation: “guzzle”) Originally an Arabic verse form dealing with loss and romantic love, medieval Persian poets embraced the ghazal, eventually making it their own. Consisting of syntactically and grammatically complete couplets, the form also has an intricate rhyme scheme. Each couplet ends on the same word or phrase (the radif), and is preceded by the couplet’s rhyming word (the qafia, which appears twice in the first couplet). The last couplet includes a proper name, often of the poet’s. In the Persian tradition, each couplet was of the same meter and length, and the subject matter included both erotic longing and religious belief or mysticism. ” I did not follow the rules exactly… Wouldn’t be my poetry if I did. I did however try to get the setup right. Tell me what you think, did I get it close enough?

©2020 Patricia Harris

Old stones sitting quietly,
places found most blindly.

Nature reclaiming,
places man lived.

Grasses growing freely,
ivy around everything you see.

Ancient things sleeping,
memories man is keeping.

Is resting continued,
when nature is what is new?