At Weekly Prompts, the Weekend Challenge is the word, Discovery. Please go over and visit their fabulous site by clicking >> Here … and my poem below is in response to their prompt
I have just completed the second edit and redraft of the manuscript for my book “Until Eyes Hear Sound”, and officially the poem below, will be the Book’s opening poem in, Chapter 1, ‘Little Creatures and The Birds
My poem “Winter Slaps Autumn in the Eye” was one of 17 selected for publication in the Geelong Writers, “Winter Solstice Challenge” Brochure. Below is a photo of how the poem appears in the Geelong Writers Brochure
In keeping with my “Whale Theme” this week, I found this piece from September 2022, while I was selecting poems for my up-coming book “Until Eyes Hear Sound”
In those ignorant bad old days Who would have wanted to be a whale? Who threw that harpoon into my back?
Whales Cry Too (a Mariannet*)
I
Hear them cry
…..When horrific harpoons pierce their hides
…..My heart bleeds from inside
……….Seeing whales so cruelly maimed
The name “Mariannet” was recently ‘coined’ by Paul (of Paul’s Poetry Playground) >> [ Invented Poetry Forms – The Mariannet – Paul’s Poetry Playground ] for the previously unnamed poetic form that the poet Marianne Moore created to write her classic poem “The Fish” first published in 1918. The form was invented over a hundred years ago and is relatively unknown to most poets. The mariannet is an isosyllabic rhyming poem, consisting of one or more five-line stanzas (quintains) with one syllable in the first line, three in the second, nine in the third, six in the fourth, and eight in the fifth and final line. The first two lines rhyme with each other, and so does the third and fourth, but the fifth is nonrhyming and does not rhyme with any other lines. Thus its rhyme scheme can be expressed as aabbx for each individual quintain (with x representing the nonrhyming line). In Moore’s original formatting of the form, the third and fourth lines were indented five spaces and the fifth ten spaces. Below, I have attached Marianne Moore’s poem “The Fish”, and below is a poignat Lisa Hannigan’s music/video.
“The Fish” – by Marianne Moore
wade through black jade. Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps adjusting the ash-heaps; opening and shutting itself like
an injured fan. The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave, cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the
sun, split like spun glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness into the crevices— in and out, illuminating
the turquoise sea of bodies. The water drives a wedge of iron through the iron edge of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink rice-grains, ink- bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green lilies, and submarine toadstools, slide each on the other.
All external marks of abuse are present on this defiant edifice— all the physical features of
ac- cident—lack of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and hatchet strokes, these things stand out on it; the chasm-side is
dead. Repeated evidence has proved that it can live on what can not revive its youth. The sea grows old in it.
