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Suzette Richards Poem
A period of youthful vim ferments
as coruscating golden flecks in eyes
that mesmerise and tantalise, give rise
to secrets in my breast to stir, foment.
The xanthous tresses that cascade torment.
My eager and impressionable sighs
that echo every pirouette and pliés,
a fleeting intercession of lament.
A maverick when it comes to amour
and quintessentially a rakish cad.
Unrequited love longstanding rancour,
but finally become your paramour.
An enigmatic smile ever so sad;
your broken heart I gladly give succour.
Copyright © Suzette Richards | Year Posted 2021
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Suzette Richards Poem
‘The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.’ - William Blake
old corkscrewed tree
reaches up towards the light
challenges endured
incidental twists are crowned
by life’s abundant blessings
Copyright © Suzette Richards | Year Posted 2023
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Suzette Richards Poem
Blessed in abundance that manifests in our
stressed daily interaction with our fellow man, and the sincerest
form of our inner wellbeing is the outpour of laughter.
Dormant in the face of adversity, while we empathise with
modern populace at large and try to bring some
modicum of humanity and relief of the pain.
We’d all experience this from time to time and this is
seed of essence in our reality that is forever fraught.
Felled by ulterior motives – punished like Sisyphus by our
fellow peers – as the dulcet tones of compliments, the sweetest
wrung encouragement that soothed our souls like songs
sung at our cradle; the melodies now forgotten. They are
symbols indelibly edged into our subconscious and those
cymbals that tend to want to drown us out so that
we spin in the vortex, but vector us towards the stories to tell.
Be it to explain the tumultuous emotions raging beneath the surface of
our designer exterior – this is by far the saddest
hour and we, eventually, rather opt for the dilatory thought.
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Percy Bysshe Shelly – To a Skylark
Copyright © Suzette Richards | Year Posted 2023
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Suzette Richards Poem
This is the tale of a soul reaching out to others,
but receiving a cold shoulder wherever she goes.
Words and phrases
are misconstrued,
meanings attached
which cloud the issues
which she wishes
to address.
A passel
of jaded poets condescending;
who sear and cauterise
synapses
of intellect, and
in the
bud,
it’s
vim.
I
don’t
give
a
rat’s tail anymore.
Copyright © Suzette Richards | Year Posted 2019
REPOSTED 11 July 2021 with white space added between the lines.
POET'S NOTE: The expression with reference to a rat that I use in my shaped poem, could perhaps be related to a phrase ‘don't give a dead rat’ from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).
‘The Mouse’s Tale’ (which was my inspiration for this concrete shape) is a shaped poem by Lewis Carroll which appears in his novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Though no formal title for the poem is given in the text, the chapter title refers to ‘A Long Tale’ and the Mouse introduces it by saying, ‘Mine is a long and sad tale!’ As well as the contribution of typography to illustrate the intended pun in this title, artists later made the intention clear as well.
Copyright © Suzette Richards | Year Posted 2021
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Suzette Richards Poem
I balance my illicitly obtained bottle of absinthe from a man who knows a man, for an exorbitant amount of Euros, on the worn wooden windowsill of my topmost room at the rundown pension overlooking the harbour. Next to it, I place my well-thumbed copy of La Nausée.* The dark apartment window reflects back the sparse furnishings behind me. I open the window to get a better view and my eyes are immediately drawn to the four cafés on the quayside – the object of my pilgrimage. Their incongruous proximity to one another always fascinated me as it couldn’t possibly be conducive to fair trade. The incessant wind from the Channel they have to endure in this enclave during each January was a bad trade-off for escaping the snow elsewhere.
The lights from the cafés flicker at this distance like teenagers taking selfies. What is it with people’s constant desire to touch base with one another? If we’re alone in the universe, it would be a tragic waste of space; if we’re not alone, it’s still a tragic waste of space.
I shut the window when the scent of a Gitanes lit by the occupant below wafts into the night air.
THE END
200 words (Neither THE END, nor the title count towards the word count in micro fiction)
Four Cafes
Sponsor: Julia Ward
Added AFTERWARDS
Result: N/A
Title changed
BACKGROUND
The four cafés are mentioned in Sartre’s first book, and my statements 'my well-thumbed copy' and 'pilgrimage' led me to switching to the past tense. The mention of 'Euros' & 'selfies' places the piece squarely in the current modern milieu. One would not spend more than a few minutes with the window open in the middle of winter; the cold Channel wind is the prevailing wind on the north coast of France. It seldom snows in Normandy, where this book was set. As Le Havre (a fishing village until the 16th century) is now the site of heavy industry, this tale is pure creative licence.
Pension: boardinghouse in Europe.
Absinthe was banned in France for close to 100 years; only produced for export.
*La Nausée, 1938, is a philosophical novel by the existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism is a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the issue of human existence. The incessant reminder that human endeavour is and remains useless makes the book tragic as well.
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‘The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.’ ~ Carl Sagan
Copyright © Suzette Richards | Year Posted 2023
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Suzette Richards Poem
It is human nature to hate him whom you have injured. ~Tacitus
as children
we looked past the world’s artificial trappings
the ravelment of doctrines
and the glaring capitalistic displays
the only criteria was that we’re friends
growing up
the world we inhabited
shrank as we embraced
the rules of others
to fit in
adulthood
meant that we
overrode innate compassion for others
paramount concern
belonging to the right group
often at the expense of many others
leaving a particular religious group
would lead to shunning
even death
lost in this Troxler effect
we have ultimately lost the ability to discern human value
we’re set in our ways
our value compass
eventually deliquesced as it decomposed
like a corpse
how did we become so jaundiced in our outlook
it is obvious
we hate the ones we have wronged
forgiving ourselves is only path to redemption
14 June 2021
Copyright © Suzette Richards | Year Posted 2021
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Suzette Richards Poem
sea-urchins in rock pools –
the flesh, a delicacy –
sparkle –
protected from the ocean
where anemones proliferate –
by a mist-glistening
heart shaped rock:
the keeper of my secrets –
a cache of memories
of mornings snorkelling
surface
eddy on the periphery
—homesick for my roots—
a keeper lost to shifting tides
white horses
masking risk in its wake …
a plastic wrapped sushi tray
on the kitsch kitchen counter
awash with the detritus of daily life—
a cold cup of coffee
milk skin
swirling like
liquescent marmoris
fluctuant under
fractured light
tender moments
where flaws hide in the spotlight
Laetrile induced
unsettling riptides
where occasionally colour swirls
marbling visions
the future liquescent …
I’m drowning in
proposals of memories
to be made with loved ones
family secrets to
be offered up
a dish that could be as
risky as Omakase …
smiling indulgently with my eyes
as a mirror-smooth ocean –
a north-westerly wind
whipping up the occasional white horse –
hides its turbulent depths
so a state of amenomania
settles over me
the final images
– as requested –
the secrets of my life
tucked away in an abditory—
eddying between past and future
the key to
unlocking it
—left in their hearts—
Copyright © Suzette Richards | Year Posted 2025
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Suzette Richards Poem
When you are alone you are all your own. ~Leonardo da Vinci
the Milky Way that rises like a sea fret
forging a way amongst the infinite stars
draws inspiration from the souls gone before
alone
I’m my own master
to thy
I will soon return
refreshed
Copyright © Suzette Richards | Year Posted 2023
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Suzette Richards Poem
1. The Welkin
Wind blows / clouds race / vast blue sky
Breeze tugs / trees sway / great green hills
Sun scourged / sand glares / small white beach
Skip stones / thoughts nag / mind fug stills
2. The Influences
Seeds sprout / stems firm / youth glean part
New buds / core splayed / new growth hearth
Weeds choke / leaves furl / old rot stench
Chance lost / child left / seek fresh start
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'[A] single rhyme in even-numbered verses (lines)...'
Jueju (Chinese, meaning severed sentence) is a curtailed verse of Chinese origin that grew popular amongst Chinese poets during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Some of the formal rules of the regulated verse forms were applied in the case of the jueju curtailed verse. These rules, as applied to the jueju, include regular line length (either 5* or 7† stressed monosyllables per line in each quatrain), the use of a single rhyme in even-numbered verses (lines) example 1, strict patterning of tonal alternations (see the updated definition of jueju here at PS), use of a major caesura before the last three syllables, optional parallelism and grammaticality of each line as a sentence. Each couplet generally forms a distinct unit. The first introduces a reference to nature, and the third line generally introduces some turn of thought or direction within the poem, often introducing humanity. The final line ponders the meaning and draws the parts together by means of the final three syllable phrase containing a recurring reference to the subject first introduced in the first couplet. It uses a common MOTIF per quatrain, which is ideally a single poem because of the difficulty in composing a quality jueju.
The English form was first taught by Dr Jonathan Stalling at UC Berkeley in 1997 who introduced the rhyme scheme aaba (mimicking the Rubaiyat) example 2, and a dictionary of monosyllable words to be used in the phrases. The word units should pair off, more than they do between the groups, ie, into phrases of 2, (2—optional), & 3 syllables—natural caesurae (and presented as illustrated). The first groups of words in each line are spondees. The words are imagistic, and the use of symbolism are encouraged. It creates a mood rather than tell a story.
Unlike haiku (a Japanese poetic form), Chinese poetry do have rhyme (as discussed above) and metre. See my article, Introducing Three New Sonnet Forms, for the picture of metres summary.
Punctuation in jueju is superfluous. A title is optional—it is usually identified by the first two words of the jueju, but I have elected to use headnotes in these instances.
GLOSSARY
*The five-syllable form is called wujue (meaning five titles of nobility)
†The seven-syllable form qijue (meaning good grace)
RECOMMENDED READING
1. My latest article on the subject of HEADNOTES.
2. poems.com/features/what-sparks-poetry/jonathan-stalling-on-spring-snow/
3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jueju
4. LINK (A highly recommended read with a fine example of the structure of jueju poetry): About English Jueju
Copyright © Suzette Richards | Year Posted 2023
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Suzette Richards Poem
When your ambition didn’t tally with mine,
we had to learn to steer a common course.
Our earlier dreams withered on the vine
Our individual pasts were our source.
In the interest of our joint future
we had to learn to steer a common course.
If at different rates we would mature,
then allowances we must surely make
in the interest of our joint future.
To be genuinely woke or a fake,
focus only on a global career,
then allowances we must surely make.
From humanitarian course don’t veer:
for that, I am eternally grateful.
Focus only on a global career.
Resisting temptation to be spiteful
when your ambition didn’t tally with mine;
for that, I am eternally grateful.
My earlier dreams withered on the vine.
Copyright © Suzette Richards | Year Posted 2021
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