For ReadWritePoem
Here's a villanelle I wrote for a page in an altered book I made for my mom last year. It describes the day I was born. My dad was attending school about 3 hours away and when he got the call, he jumped on a bus but there was a snowstorm and it took him all day to get to my mom. They'd only been married for nine and a half months and didn't even own a car. This was back in 1949.
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The sky she was born under was full of snow
and her father barely made it on time.
All day he traveled by bus and it was so slow.
Each beat of his heart was yearning to know
her, the missing part to their rhyme.
The sky she was born under was full of snow
that fell like poetry on the world below
creating a clean world so sublime.
All day he traveled by bus and it was so slow.
He wanted to push the bus to make it go
faster and to help it climb
but the sky she was born under was full of snow
and that bus puttered along like on tippy-toe
and her dad thought it was a crime
as he traveled all day by bus so slow, so slow.
Finally, he arrived just in time for the afterglow
of birth, their poem written for a lifetime.
The sky she was born under was full of snow
and the love that traveled to her was forever and slow.
5 comments:
linda,, that was priceless... even if you didn't write it today i am thrilled to have it resurrected here from me today... just wonderful......
Linda, I tried to leave a comment a second ago. Blogger blocked it. If you read my comments twice, oh well!
Great poem! The villanelle's repeating lines work to underscore the man's wait on the bus, and then his love of his new daughter, when you change it up.
A beautiful snowy night.
I like the way the repetition fed the urgency and his impatience.
yes, precious and priceless ...just like that day in 1949...lovely
What a lovely thing to do for your parents. The repeating line of the villanelle is perfect for this.
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