X for Xiaoshi #NaPoWriMo2021

Xiaoshi,(xiao – little/small, shi – poetry) is a genre of Chinese poetry which came into being in the 1920s from the so called “short poetry movement’. It is also known as the ‘Chinese Haiku‘. Xiaoshis are about presenting vivid yet unconnected images together. These metaphors or pictures just have to have a tiny bit of causality. This form is usually written as a quatrain.

For more on this form, read – “Japanese haiku and the formation of Chinese short poetry“

Here’s an example I wrote :-

A purple frown
Her moral jewellery under lock
The rust browned key
A gift from a past lover.

S for Senryu #NaPoWriMo2021

Senryu is one of the most popular forms of Japanese poetry consisting of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. Sounds a lot like haiku? Often people confuse a senryu for being a haiku. It is because senryu follows almost the same standard rules as haiku without the reference to nature.

The important thing to remember is that in case of Senryu subjects tend to be related to human nature (as opposed to just nature in case of Haikus). They covers various subjects like romance, human relationships, ironic behavior, and often end with a “knowing moment” and little spark of laughter.

The 5-7-5 syllablic structure is a mere guideline . The main goal is to capture an image or moment in a short and concise way.

Here’s my attempt at a Senryu :-

Every little fete
Another nail in the coffin
I am getting married

K for Kwansaba #NaPoWriMo2021

The Kwansaba is a form of praise poetry invented by Eugene B. Redmond. This form is based on the seven day holiday of Kwanzaa and the its seven principles – unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith. The poetry form celebrates and praises these seven principles in African- American communities. Some of its elements of praise are derived from South African traditions.

It is a seven line poem with seven words in each line. No word in the poem exceeds the letter count of seven. There are no rhyming constraints in this form.

Here’s my attempt at one. The muse of my example is the reigning UFC heavyweight champion, Francis Ngannou.

Born and raised in the Guinea Gulf
Forged in the fire of Central world
He sailed to cross the endless sea
and failed, failed till he made it
to the city of lights, under lights
The hands of steel left a mark
A golden crown rests on his waist.

N for Nonet

The nonet poetic form is simple. It’s a 9-line poem that has 9 syllables in the first line, 8 syllables in the second line, 7 syllables in the third line, and continues to count down to one syllable in the final (ninth) line.

Here is my example:

I see the truth has been washed ashore
Lifeless like the sand it lays in
draped in dirt it has rolled in
hoping to be picked up,
be saved by the sun
And with a smirk,
the lie stands
amongst
us.

Untitled

I received a letter from your town
with the envelope of self-sufficiency
I couldn’t dare to open it
The stamp of your fragrance spoke
louder than what I could hear.

Your words, your letters
your hieroglyphic text
your vocabulary that I couldn’t catalogue
Your theories that were far beyond my grasp.

For the love that never lasted
and I wanted to enchant you at any cost
flickering fiercely like a burning star.

You explained to me about every cell
every tissue, every organism
and the world’s need to reproduce.
You divided Philosophy by biology.

You taught me how free will is
just an electromagnetic phenomenon
And how our nerves are mere conductors
Your so called modern thinking
wrecked my archaic self.

And how you framed the equations
fitting in the emotions
into a cost-profit formula
I remember it all too well.

I tried to change your mind
I tried to change your heart
I wrote endless rhymes for you,
forging innumerous metaphors.

But I could not reach you across
Distances or time, across the climes
I couldn’t cross the bridge of thoughts
that seprated us.
In darkest of nights, in lonely terror
I leapt for you but couldn’t hold on.

I woke to find my life had bled
Uncertainty and too much cowardice
I opened up the letter from my soul
to find my spirited parts had turned to ashes
and I felt you by your energy.

I was abandoned, brittle, and deformed
but I knew you existed somewhere
you thrived and blossomed
like only you could
My morality died a painful death
and I could not find solace.

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As the slow servile past
Creeps on our backs
I will speak a tale or two
Some hopeless narrative that shoots
Some fervor into our spirits

Your timidness won’t have a place
It will swing like a pendulum
In between those raspy notes
Of self sufficiency.

And as the dust of your soul
Will settle down on your pride
You will honk at me
Call me with the names,
Metaphors and analogies that
You so dearly etched onto me

You may shout my name
Like a rhyme that has been
Recited too often
That the heart knows the joy,
The muscle memory
The motility of perfect synchronization

I will be summoned
I will be remembered
For my skills with your brain
For my familiarity with your heart.

And maybe not that long ago
I might have seen myself there
I might have shouted your name a few times
But not today
Not now
Not when you have sold your soul
To better prospects
To a better life.

You won’t be a discarded letter
Or a Song that doesn’t have no singers no more
But a Poem, a verse
Left forever between two pages
Of a book.

The Flinty Aisle

There is a new road leading to a new city
With red leaves from December
rambled in the candid truths of time
branches of tempting struggles
that grips time in hollow minds

Your scrawny voice, that rips through
my etherized face of memories
the slumber scent, that covers the road
in the anticipation of a silver spring.

These symbols of hypnotizied realities
Like a new floor of myth manufacturing
Words that pierce sharper than the silence
Dangling between the stillness of time

Hopes soaring uncertainly to nightfall
The dreams that have kept me awake
The beautiful imperfection of yours
I don’t have the courage to take new routes
I don’t have the heart to let you go

The crepuscule reconcilation of our souls
There is an inscrutable fusion
Of all the misery, the emotion , the trust
Some winged desire of dazzling dreams

We are however flawed in our own dread
like empty hushes of an abandoned house
Familiar, forgotten, a secret door to memories
That spilled in and out of the consciousness.

I garner the tinges of the sun and your condign glint
As in a vaporous hallowed place, our rituals fade
Would the misty light hear my moning prayers?
to let us grope our own glory once more.

Image source- http://donmezerm.deviantart.com/gallery/

Reviving the erstwhile love

I hold onto my vices
After years of distance apart us
Today, I love you suddenly like
some gold nugget found on a street

The stiffness that stops me from bending
and pick it up from the sand
bursting through my obdurated pride.

On my chest is the gesture of eternity
where you have spent nights my love
Your eyes that live in mine

I need you because your soul
Teaches me, like the ages, like the sea
When you walk through the familiar routes
Where everyone is beautiful but us

Let us part ourselves from history
and realize the bitterness in each other,
in some candied poetic ways.
And then be united,
out of the spiritual compulsion

I will fill your curiosity
with my new ways of enthrall
Your green eyes will shudder
and your heart will dance to a strange rhythm.

An intrigue of nights we shared
A soul of souls that lives on
A part in me and a part in you.

On going with the flow

Where has the sky taken me to?
Wraaping me in the storm of vastness
Dancing over murmured joys
They claim the pleasure undefined

Air, Water and all that flows
The whispers of untamed gods
The paths I never knew of
Lost within the infinity of my power

I am a speck, a fragment
a fleck, a grain
a seed, a scrap
a drop, a morsel

The quantum of sacrifices
that my ascendents brewed me with
I am the ray that unveils the dust
I am the final drizzle of the summer

I am the rampant road,
the vernal sage
subdued to the rippling gales of life.

Depreciated Beauty

Sip the pride
And walk through the subway
grabbing attention, only of beggars and homeless
You have realized,
Your beauty has saturated
and is declining perhaps
You haven’t had a lover in a while
The queues are longer now
The eyes are vanishing slowly
The lack of stares, you wouldn’t have thought, would bother you.
Is beauty punctuated?
One mark and it stops
But there it gains rhythm on the other side.
How can beauty be mathematical then?
Exponential, Logarithmic,
Some Cost Profit Formula?