Dawn Shadows

The train is leaving the station
As people move towards the deep
The nightingale whistles a tune
To herald the moon to sleep

Moving people too deep to ward
Dark dungeons and royal escort
The moon song sleep is a herald
The life of a monarch so short

For dark escorts and dungeons alike
Twenty-three to that blind hour
A short monarch life is over
The taste of the evening so sour

The twenty-third hour, blinds drawn
To excise the focus within
The sour sight of eventide blight
A master of sorrow and sin

To excuse all my focus within
A copy is made instead
To master my sorrow, my sin
And leave me hungered for bread

To copy and bake instead
A witness to secrets concealed
That hunger that no bread can sate
Is a mind in a terrified field

The witness who kept all my secrets
Long gone in the vapid fog
My terrible mind was a field
A soldier alone in a bog

But the vapid fog is long gone
A statue free from its space
That soldier, no longer bogged down,
Questions what could be left in its place

Of statutes freed from the pace
Which precedes a life moving on
The question is what to replace
When shadows are left at the dawn

All this proceeds, life moving on
As the nightingale whistles adieu
No time to search for dawn shadows
My train may be passing through

 

 

Alright, after my previous five-verse pantoum, I had two goals for my second attempt.  1) I wanted to make a pantoum that was longer than five stanzas and 2) I wanted to see if I could make my pantoum rhyme.  What resulted, as you can see, is a pantoum that’s a lot more free than the form usually allows.  It’s been a while since I first wrote this, but I do remember that it came a lot more quickly than I expected.  I think that that’s how pantoums should be written; all in one sitting, leaving any editing for later.

A Symptom of Silence

This is a symptom of silence
To gaze at the starry sky
It’s bliss that we have no fear
And no reason to wonder why

Those who dance in the starry sky
Together; they look at us and
Wonder why we have no reason
To be happy all the time

Together, we look at them and
Laugh at their foolish attempts
To be happy all the time
When there is no hope for anyone

And they laugh at our foolish attempts
To cover the holes in our hearts
When there is no hope for anyone
But, we understand the truth

To cover the holes in our hearts
A fear that we might have bliss
But we understand the truth
A symptom of silence is this

On Pantoums

The pantoum is probably my favorite poetic form of all time.  It’s a form with any number of four-line stanzas where each stanza after repeat lines from the previous stanza.  So, the second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the first and third lines of the second stanza, respectively, and this pattern continues throughout the poem.  On the final stanza, the first and third lines of the first stanza become the fourth and second (or second and fourth, either way works) lines of the final stanza respectively.  If that sounds confusing, here’s a chart, with letters representing specific lines.

a
b
c
d

b
e
d
f

e
g
f
h

g
c (or a)
h
a (or c)

I personally prefer ending a pantoum with the first line (a), but that’s just my preference. Either way appears to be acceptable. Other than that, anything goes for this poem. There are no meter requirements; no rhyme scheme is necessary. The trick is to write lines that can have double meanings in the right context.

Having the same lines repeat over and over can make your poem feel like a metronome without some changes, so the difficulty in this poetic form is finding the right ways to change certain lines slightly in order to make them work in context.