A lyric poem, from a tired teacher, on imagining summertime rest
in the midst of wrapping up the school year.
A couple weeks ago, I stepped out my front door into the night, and noticed the shift in the humidity, and how the air was warm on my skin. It made me long for those old, carefree days of summertime when I was a youth, and for camping with my family and friends. And really, just for summer break. I’ve been so over it with the school year, and aching terribly for warm summer nights, and unhurried mornings, sipping hot coffee on the front porch in a lingering prayer time. It was in this place of longing that the following poem came about.
Lyric XI - Find Rest for Your Souls
The evening air is warm, and I’d like to sleep here without a care. If only I had camping gear, I’d doze off, with music in ear; the crickets’ chirp throughout our quiet vicinage; the settling burb. The tree frogs’ trill, in foliage, is steady snore, a sedative. Under the stars – rotating, twinkling, dangling lights – my reservoirs, these two eyes, fill up with the sight and I relax my mind from might. A spotty breeze blows over epidermis, bare, and does appease. I breathe in circulating air, then exhale, and close eyes to care.
If you’ve been following my thoughts on poetic form, and care about that kind of stuff, you may remember that, lately, I am trying out new forms besides the sonnet. The past ten poems I’ve written were rondelets (pronounced ron-de-lay, by the way, thank you for helping me with my French). And, after having practiced ten of those, I felt it was time to find a different form, and so I began perusing a poetry anthology and I found this one by Edmund Waller.
Because I appreciated the message of the Waller poem so much (if you’re having a hard time understanding it, I suggest, like I did, running it through your preferred AI pal - ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc - and commanding it to explain the poem to you line by line) and because the meter was similar to the rondelet, I decided I would try out the form of this poem. As far as I know, this form has no particular name, but I suppose I could coin one? Anyhow, so, I will be practicing this particular form for the next few poems that I write (thanks to my friend, Kim Marino, for the pottery metaphor), in order to build “muscle memory” in myself, for this type of meter and rhyme.
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Nice work with the form! It has the feel of one of the Welsh forms, more so because of the scattered internal rhymes.
Enjoyed your poem and the explanation for form that followed