Prayer Roundel Poems

 
"Every secret memory, every experience in life, and every 
thought can be written within the words of a poem."

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Rondels, Roundels and Rondeaux

These are poetic forms similar to villanelles, with refrains (repeated lines) and sometimes double refrains.



Rondel: Merciles Beaute ("Merciless Beauty")
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation...

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Charles d'Orleans: a Medieval Marvel


Spring
by Charles d’Orleans (c. 1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Young lovers,
greeting the spring
fling themselves downhill,
making cobblestones ring
with their wild leaps and...

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Merciles Beaute ("Merciless Beauty")
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart...

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Oft in My Thought
by Charles D'Orleans
translation by Michael R. Burch

So often in my busy mind I sought,
Around the advent of the fledgling year,
For something pretty...

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Spring
by Charles d'Orleans (c.1394-1465)
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Young lovers,
greeting the spring
fling themselves downhill,
making cobblestones ring
with their wild leaps and arcs,
like ecstatic sparks
struck from coal.

What...

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To be so rich that we can buy 
whatever we desire to
They'll envy us, who just scrape by
To be so rich...

We'll lust and love, just...

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Along fringes of a lowland, mid-air
I hold  blossoms drifting in tranquil pace
A refuge where north-winds ease city’s glare—
Entranced by field’s view.


Hummingbirds spin on marshes...

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