Refusal

Refusal

I hear your song – the liquid gold

that floats, enticing me: ‘Take hold!

Reach up into the cool night air!’

But I am not so crazy bold.

How could I grasp a song that flies

like fire across the darkening skies?

Its molten edges twist and fray,

an evanescent cloud of lies.

Your voice is beautiful; your words

are gleaming bright, but they are swords.

I know by now the shape of pain:

these notes are blades, not singing birds.

The music pierces to my heart,

and yet I say we shall not start

the bright duet you’re offering.

Tempter begone! Be off! Depart!


Another Rubaiyat for Poetry Forms – The Rubaiyat at dVerse. This time I decided to try the option of using tetrameter. The metre is not quite perfect; even Shakespeare understood that a strict metre may need to be varied slightly to avoid monotony (smile). Even so, this took a lot of work, a lot of attention to detail and experimenting with the best ways to employ the rhymes. 

As for the content, it's an imaginary situation – though I'm sure we've all experienced similar things at times.

Also linking this one to the Tuesday Platform, In these times of love and oppression, at 'imaginary garden with real toads'.

Dreaming of Andrew

Dreaming of Andrew

There he, is my dear husband, not dead after all. How

could he have been here all this time and I didn’t know?

Still white-haired, he’s walking freely. His beautiful face,

when he sees me coming towards him, fills with a glow.

He’s in a little stone house by the beach. I’ve not seen

this place before, but he has been living here it seems,

cared for by an old friend of ours who, it turns out, owns

this cottage. (No need to explain things further in dreams.)

We are so happy! Together again, what rapture!

… Even after I wake up, I can still recapture

that joy, so strong in the dream that it stays with me now –

a sure foundation which nothing will ever fracture.


A Rubaiyat, for Poetry Forms – The Rubaiyat at dVerse. I learn online that 'Rubaiyat' refers to both the ancient Persian poetic form and to its English variants. Reading that the original Persian had 13 syllables per line and no set metre, I thought I'd try that. The rhyme scheme is one of several traditional variations. I found the 13-syllable line unexpectedly hard to manage and the results rather prosey. However, even Fitzgerald's translation of Omar is more philosophical than imagistic a lot of the time, so I'll let it be.

Yes, the dream and its aftermath did happen, quite recently. I realise with hindsight that the dream cottage was at a beach which was the scene of the joyful reunion of a long-parted couple in a movie I saw not long ago; and the friend who owned the cottage in my dream is someone who did sometimes come and spend time with Andrew in his final months, when I was his carer, so that I could go out for a walk.