Nobody’s Around
The news today from my bed
is that all the news is bad.
I’m advised, ’Have a good nap!’
but my tears don’t let me sleep.
The news is: you are not there.
Yet nor are you absent, dear.
Memory has you appear
(at the same time as gone) here.
In public cheerful, not sad,
I grieve alone and unheard.
I grieve alone and unheard.
That’s it. There’s nothing to add.
There’s no new news from my bed.
For Day 11 of April Poet, the prompt at 'imaginary garden with real toads' is The News From Your Bed – which is a song from which we could use a line or phrase; or else we could simply write about the news from our own bed. I did both. (The phrase I picked is the one I use as my title.)
The form is loosely based on the qijue or seven-syllable jueju, a Chinese form. But that is actually far too complex to copy properly in English; for one thing it requires a particular pattern of the tonal language which seems impossible for English to reproduce. (This would be an extended jueju anyway, being more than one quatrain.)
The form is loosely based on the qijue or seven-syllable jueju, a Chinese form. But that is actually far too complex to copy properly in English; for one thing it requires a particular pattern of the tonal language which seems impossible for English to reproduce. (This would be an extended jueju anyway, being more than one quatrain.)