[POET’s NOTE : This is the first of five poems on Revolutionary Poet, Bertolt Brecht, who had a profound impact on South African revolutionaries during the transition into a National Democratic state from an Apartheid one. We often read from his works during mass meetings for change.
Brecht worked in hexameters, rhyming quatrains, sonnets, ballads, unrhyming verse in regular meters, as well as shapes, as occasion demanded. For Brecht, technique & form mattered less than content, except that it held content stable. ]
__________________
Bertolt Brecht, his revolutionary vivid poems are etched into spinal nerves deep
his dramatic language caused awakenings from ignorant sleep
poetic outpourings against war flashed bleep bleep
he had to flee home country with human consciousness to sweep
~~~~~~~
***Sedoka: syllabically, 577577, an unrhyming single verse with no breaks or pauses
Sudoku, A Numbers Game
Preset numbers are
placed in a nine by nine frame
containing nine three by three
cubes and each three by
three cubes and each column and
each row numbers one through nine
***Apps obtainable online
WARNING: Can be addictive
2020 September 27
How Are You Feeling? II
I feel purple.
As purple as a two day old bruise
As ominous as a purple thunderhead
As desolate as a starless purple sky
As out of sync
As the unrhyming word itself
Purple!
~Love The Lord~
(Hotan)
Love Lord with all heart
His presence feel day and night
Hear His message heed His call
He loves us
He's not far away
When we fall
He's right beside us
When troubled He hears our prayers
He lifts our spirits each day and night.
Dorian Petersen Potter
aka ladydp2000
copyright@2013
March.18.2016
~Author's Notes:
The " Hotan " is a Japanese syllabic poem of nine unrhyming lines, the Hotan gets its name from it's syllabe pattern, being a combination of a Haiku (hokku = ho) and a Tanka (tan).
Lost like unused syllables in unrhyming words
petals of frilled sorrow drip to the earth from weeping trees,
crying each filigreed petal slowly, one by one,
in cascades of gentle tears to their tender rest,
shaping billowing beds of brightly colored pillows,
until soft breaths of evening breeze exhale long sighs
through longing limbs creating whirlwinds of smiling fragrance
in the fawning dance of each nectarous petal.
Like lover's swirling in life's last dying embrace,
reflections of cold loneliness slip past with each fallen bud.
Soon the flowers will be lost in winter's stark gray advance,
and the smooth bark of the Crepe Myrtle will lie dormant
yearning for the elongating warm caress of Spring,
and its delicate chiffon cloak of humbled innocence,
again hiding its discomfiting gnarled nakedness
behind silken vales of scintillating incandescence.
11/07/15
I could not tell the two of you apart.
even when i tried to squint you just
grew narrower
and these words are slender stalks in a field
seamless yet sperate, unrhyming yet punctuated.
i remember sitting in the kitchen with poor
posture misspelling the word absence.
you collected a few of the absract moments
to form are binary convoluted past personages.
who spoke in the third person and misdiagnosed
the moments before leaving only shades of
gray pathologies for us to follow.
niether light nor dark.
i tried to gather a little from the two of you
to trace an opinioned outline of you on
some paper, but the opinions fell down.
so i used instead a magnet off of your refrigerator.
you said something like..... what are you doing
or i think im thirsty.
a half empty half full glass sits on the
counter across the room.
... [into] the oaken box in which the hunted King was secreted....
Capern essayed to descend...
- Elihu Burritt, Walks in the Black Country (1868)
Suppose a poet-postman, full of good Victorian
Embonpoint, should chance to
Step into this house of hiding – a nook unknown to
Questing Roundhead spies – and think to slip
Unseen into the oubliette fitted out
In Cromwell’s days for a king; suppose this very
Poet – more portly in the midriff than Charles
Escaping from his throne – gets caught
Dead-center in the all-too-narrow trap-door gap.
Alas, for all his wriggling, he’s trapped
Longitudinally between floors. What can a poet,
Ill-versed in such historic lore, do but
Taunt the Muses with his long, many-syllabled
Yelps, unrhyming but in vivid metaphor?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.