Tags
atonement, creativity, dance songs, dreaming awake, Elaine Stirling, form poetry, forme fixe, harmony, letting be, Medieval French verse, mindfulness, musical chansons, nagual, palimpsest, rondeau, the creative impulse
A Rondeau
There’s a poem like a koan
that refuses to be known
at the edges of my dreaming
like a palimpsest revealing
shades of doubt erased and shown
between the traces finely combed
a certainty poetic that is home
& hearth to all I’m feeling, there’s a poem
in moments when I think that I’m alone
it overturns illusions I’ve outgrown
and pulls from them a reckoning
deliberately sublime, and chiming
harmony atoned, there’s a poem.
~~~
© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Oceantics 
Well Elaine I stole your title; couldn’t help myself it was such a good one and managed this smaller cousin of your rondeau. These rare forms are certainly fun and I hope you don’t mind me following you in your (very successfully executed) fun.
Palimpsest
A Triolet
Like indelible invisible ink
Words surface when needed
Completing lines unknown;
Like indelible invisible ink
Cyphers reveal by undertone
Meaning that’s been seeded
Like indelible invisible ink
Words surface when needed.
LikeLike
Poetic dialogues are the best, Russel. In my opinion, they are the human equivalent of birdsong…one strikes up a healthy chirp, the forest echoes with the ever more poetic, proseful, beautiful–and fun!
I love that your triolet IS the definition of palimpsest (and the creative process). My logical left brain thought I ought to use a palimpsest as the photographic image, but the saner part insisted on a Tibetan singing bowl, thereby chiming space for your poetic image. Thank you!
LikeLike
Nice! What’s behind a palimpset is not always traces of doubt. Could be an unrecognized masterpiece, or a missing cipher.
LikeLike
Thanks, Mikels! There are two words (well, probably 1000s more) that I’ve never been able to retain the meanings of (participle dangles by choice). Palimpsest was one of them. When I needed a DUH-duh-duh word for the 4th line, that one elbowed its chimeric little self in. Palimpsest and I are now friends.
The other word, still Greek to me, is “solipsism”.
One more side note: My old Webster’s defines chimera as a flame-vomiting she-monster. That, I like!
LikeLike
Dang! That old Webster had some serious gender issues!
LikeLike
Haha, I know. I LOVE old dictionaries and encyclopedias for those reasons.
LikeLike
Ok, palimpsest, triolet – both uncommon words that I’m happy to have on my vocabulary’s back-up drive now.
Now, chimera, that was one I thought I knew! But, oh my, the places I can employ it with THAT definition under my belt! All those Goddess Kali characteristics I exhibit fit quite nicely under “chimera”. Perhaps the male version of the word is simply chimer? (Of course readers will interpret that to mean a “chiming bell of a person” instead of the “flame-vomiting man” I’m wanting them to infer.)
LikeLike
Creative, I have a stitch in the side in the making as I imagine a conversation where someone mispronounces the word for “flame-vomiting man”, and the other person retorts: “It’s pronounced SHIM-mer, you ____!” (Insert desired epithet) Yes, poetry is great for unearthing words you’d never use…and so many of the great forms are still called by their medieval names, probably because when the Black Death came along–or something equally horrendous–people stopped writing them.
LikeLike