Category Archives: quatrains

Weekend read: Parody poem: Marcus Bales, ‘Slash Wednesday’

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I
Because I do not do the limerick line
Because I do not do
Because I do not do the limerick
Desiring this man’s schtick or that man’s joke
I will stick to knocking out free verse
(If here and there a rhyme so much the worse)
In mournful moans
Presented ragged-right upon the page.

II
There once was a Lady with three
White leopards, a juniper tree,
And a bag full of bones
That sang their sad moans
Of what they had once hoped to be.

III
At every turning of the turning stair,
Your breathing hard, your eyesight edged with dark,
You see the face of hope and of despair.

You breathe the vapor of the fetid air
And toil as if some atmospheric shark
At every turning of the turning stair

Was hunting through the gathering darkness there,
While back and forth across the narrative arc
You see the face of hope and of despair.

At every turning there’s a window where
You contemplate a drop that’s still more stark
At every turning of the turning stair.

Instead you circle upward as you swear
Like you are looking for a place to park.
You see the face of hope and of despair.

You can’t endure the future’s dismal dare
Nor drag yourself to put out your own spark
At every turning of the turning stair.

You’re learning how to care and not to care
And whether you will make or be a mark.
You see the face of hope and of despair
At every turning of the turning stair.

IV
Higgledy piggledy
Here we are all of us
Trudging along where some
Billions have trod

Smelling the flowers and
Trusting religionists’
Tergiversational
Rodomontade.

V
If the word that is lost isn’t lost,
And the word that is spent isn’t spent
Then silence is actually speaking,
And meaning is something unmeant.

If the meaning is what is unheard
And the word is the thing that’s unspoken
Then how do you hear if a word
Has a meaning that hasn’t been broken.

If the unspoken word must be still
And the unheard is what it’s about
To have heard the unhearable meaning
The inside has got to be out.

If the unheard were out of this world
And the light shone in darkness were dark
Then the unlit unheard would be meaning
If the snuffer provided the spark.

If the yadda can yadda its yadda
And the pocus was what hocus took
Then gobble must surely be gobble
Though dee separates it from gook.

VI
Awake! Your hope to turn or not to turn
Is wasting time – but go ahead and yearn
To see the light or hear the word to know
A heaven human beings can’t discern.

There’s nothing there for such as you and me;
We make our meaning up from what we see
And hear and touch and taste and smell and think —
But all there is is fragments and debris.

The steps are just the steps, the stairs the stairs,
The rest is merely human hopes and prayers
That do no more than hopes and prayers can do,
And nothing’s chasing you except your heirs.

No unmoved mover writes upon some slate
That mortals may abate or not abate;
No hope and no despairing of that hope
Reveals what nothing states, or doesn’t state.

Whatever happens happens because of us
We get a muss when we don’t make a fuss
Demanding right from wrong not mere convenience:
We’re all complicit underneath this bus.

Awake! Don’t hope to turn or not to turn,
Don’t pray that this is none of your concern.
Awake! What will it take for you to learn
That if it all burns down you, too, will burn?

*****

Marcus Bales has produced this wonderful set of parodies of the long T.S. Eliot poem ‘Ash Wednesday‘, beginning with a piece in the poem’s style for Part I,
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

but then moving into a limerick for Part II’s
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

and a 22-line villanelle for Part III’s
At the first turning of the second stair

and a double dactyl for Part IV’s
Who walked between the violet and the violet

and quatrains for Part V’s
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;

and finally rubaiyat with a strong flavour of FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyam for Part VI’s
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

‘Ash Wednesday‘ has proved one of Eliot’s best-known and most quoted poems, with its signature mixture of Christian mysticism, personal emotion, loose form and scattered rhyme, rich imagery and memorable wordplay. Bales’ ‘Slash Wednesday‘ is an appropriate tour de force of a back-handed homage, mocking Eliot’s ragged rambling with a sampling of forms that could have been used (inappropriately) instead.

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ’51 Poems’ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘form in formless times’).

This is being posted a couple of days late for Ash Wednesday, but as it’s for the already late T.S. Eliot that shouldn’t matter too much…

Photo: “File:T S Eliot Simon Fieldhouse.jpg” by Simon Fieldhouse is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Quatrains: Fergus Cullen, ‘Wisdom of Working Men’

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“One thing you must accept,”
Said the butcher—”and I don’t intend this meanly:
To live is to get divided up
And to live well is to divide up cleanly.”

“One thought that made sense of things,”
Said the baker—“perhaps even solved life’s riddle:
To live is to harden in the heat
And to live well is to stay soft in the middle.”

“One principle strikes me as ultimate,”
Said the candlestick-maker—“if not downright holy:
To live is to burn down
And to live well is to burn down slowly.”

*****

Fergus Cullen writes: “These stanzas are about that state in which work comes to occupy one’s mind so utterly that one begins to see the rest of life through it. They do not make any statement on the subject: we just hear from some personalities living in this condition.I wanted contrast. On the one hand, the form is so light as to be barely there (speech rhythms in long lines, stanzas only pulled together by trite rhymes); and the characters originate in the world of nursery rhyme. On the other, these characters take on the biggest subject; and what they say may sound rueful, even bitter. It was certainly written that way; though, returning to it after some time, I see that it need not be read that way. This is one of two versions of the poem and was published in The Borough. I hope the other, rather different, shall appear soonish.”

Fergus Cullen is a postgraduate researcher in history at Queen Mary, University of London, and an occasional writer and translator of prose and verse.

https://x.com/FairGoose
https://ferguscullen.blogspot.com/p/about.html

Photo: “Rub-a-dub-dub Three Men in a Tub” by DJOtaku is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Quatrains: Susan McLean, ‘Pain Management’

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The management has gauged how much you’ll take
before you buckle or walk out. They care
about your health—at least until you break,
use up your sick leave, or require repair.

The management endorses your retiring
early. They will help you out the door,
so that they can economize by hiring
fresh blood for half of what they paid before.

The management can’t monetize your gain
in knowledge or experience. They doubt
that anything you’d do if you remain
could beat their savings if you’re shunted out.

They needn’t lay you off, just raise your stress
through higher workloads and adverse conditions,
until exhaustion, strain, and hopelessness
force you to leave, fulfilling their ambitions.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “In my lifetime, I’ve worked in private businesses, government agencies, and academia; most of them abused or exploited workers at some level, which is not surprising when power relations are one-sided. However, I was most shocked by what happened when the business model was applied to education. Education suffers when students are treated as products to be turned out as cheaply as possible, and when teachers are treated as easily replaceable cogs in a machine. But the mistreatment of workers to increase profitability is widespread across many forms of employment, so I did not want to limit the poem’s relevance to the academic world.

“Over the thirty years that I taught at a state university, states reduced the amount they paid for public higher education, shifting the economic burden more and more to the students, and creating budget crises for the universities. In response, university administrators reduced their hiring of professors, often increasing class sizes dramatically, shifting teaching of many classes to ridiculously underpaid grad students or adjunct instructors with no job security, and shutting down departments in order to lay off tenured professors. Students were paying more and getting less; professors were overworked and fearful of losing their jobs at ages at which no one else would be likely to hire them; recent PhDs were unable to find teaching jobs with a livable wage or any prospect of long-term employment. Meanwhile, administrative jobs were burgeoning, adding more deans and assistant deans to bolster the status and shoulder the duties of those in charge.

“The stress and overwork that many professors experienced under the business model of higher education took a physical toll on many, with some disciplines suffering more than others. Those who had to spend endless hours at computers or grading papers tended to develop back pain and a host of other ailments common to sedentary jobs. When administrators offered incentives for them to accept early retirement, so that the university could save money by replacing them with lower-paid workers, many retired. I was one of them.

“This poem got its start when I noticed that “pain management” (usually associated with using analgesics or other methods to reduce pain) could also mean “management by means of pain.” It was published in New Verse Review.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Stress” by topgold is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Barbara Loots, ‘Love Song’

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You are the butterfly whose wings
stir up a rainfall in Peru.
The tropic fern unfurled that brings
an earthquake in Tibet is you.

The cry bursting from blackbirds’ throats
that turns the tide on Iceland’s shore
is you, and Sahara’s dusty motes
rosing the sunset in Lahore.

Who is the breath of an infant’s sigh
that sparks the heart of a unicorn?
The rock streaking the moonless sky
that wafts a feather around Cape Horn?

You, the invisible silver thread
between Zanzibar and Amsterdam.
Even by thought unlimited,
whatever the you may be, I am.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “On my way to copy out the poem I meant to send you, I ran across this one. It has appeared only once in print, so I decided to give it another chance at immortality. Love is too small a word to contain the energy field of creation, evolution, and eternity. But this little verse (published in my second collection Windshift, from Kelsay Books, 2018) helps connect me with ‘whatever the you may be‘ right here and now.”

Barbara Loots resides with her husband, Bill Dickinson, and their boss Bob the Cat in the historic Hyde Park neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks since the 1970s. She is a frequent contributor to lightpoetrymagazine.com. Her three collections are Road Trip (2014), Windshift (2018), and The Beekeeper and other love poems (2020), at Kelsay Books or Amazon. More bio and blog at barbaraloots.com

Photo: “September 1st 2008 – They’re Back” by Stephen Poff is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Lindsay McLeod, ‘Last Call’

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If this isn’t what you’ve yearned for
or indeed what you are craving
then cup your hands, drink deeply
of a sweeter misbehaving.

If you cannot find your wine inside
the glass that you were given,
taste the new with eyes and thighs
and dye your lips a deep vermillion

with a juice that has been pressed
from vines let grow out of control
that taste of summertime and
sex and drugs and rock and roll

because if you…

find distaste in your final breath
dressed in another’s ill fit clothes
remember, this did not just happen
sweetheart, this is what you chose.

*****

Lindsay McLeod is an Australian poet that has won a few things and is widely published. He just had to start messing about with words again lately. You’d think he’d know better by now, but oh no. Some of his most recent work can be found in DILLYDOUN REVIEW, GRAND LIL THINGS, DRAWN TO THE LIGHT, POETiCA and MORTAL MAGAZINE.

RHL: In addition to Mr McLeod’s self-description, let me add that I have been trying and failing to contact him. I don’t even have permission to post this poem. If anyone can put me in touch with him, I would be grateful.

Photo: “98/365: ♫ Red, Red Wine…” by rogersmj is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Odd poem: Brian Bilston, ‘Brie Encounter’

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the skies are gruyere since she left me
i’ve never felt so danish blue
caught between a roquefort and a hard cheese
i stilton’t know what to do

don’t give edam about the future
now my babybel’s walked out the door
can’t believe i’ve double gloucester
i camembert it any more

i’ve ricotta get myself together
and build my life back caerphilly
cheddar tear for the final time
say goodbye to us and halloumi

*****

Brian Bilston is “the Banksy of the poetry world”.
You can find a daily poem on Facebook, and his books here.

Photo: “Cheese, cheese, cheese” by kurafire is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Susan McLean, ‘Home Economics’

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Like other teenage girls in ‘65,
I learned to knit, embroider, and crochet,
so if I’m teleported back in time
a century or two, I’ll do okay.

I learned the way to wrap a package neatly,
to tie a range of plain and froufrou bows,
to minimize my body flaws discreetly,
using the cut and pattern of my clothes.

I also learned to iron, hem, and baste,
to sew on zippers, trim, and appliqué,
to choose a hairdo that would suit my face—
and nothing that I ever use today.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “In the mid-Sixties, the times were changing, but the education of teenage girls was not. In junior high school home economics classes, which girls were required to take, the girls were trained in sewing and cooking skills as preparation for their future roles as wives and mothers. The ideas that men might need to know any of those skills or that women might have full-time careers were not considered. In addition to teaching girls domestic skills, the classes served to reinforce the gender roles and expectations of the time (which had not changed significantly from those of the previous few centuries).

“I slightly overstate my case when I say that I never use anything now that I learned in the two years of sewing classes I took. I still wrap a package and sew on a button occasionally, but I had learned both of those skills well before I took the classes. And even when I was taking the classes, I was already determined to have a career of my own. I petitioned successfully to be allowed to skip the cooking classes so that I could take art classes in their place (though, ironically or not, I am now an enthusiastic home cook). I didn’t mind learning various sewing skills, which had an artistic side, but I had no interest in spending a lot of time using them afterwards, and the view of my options that the classes conveyed was quite dispiriting. No one foresaw how radically the roles of many women would be changing soon afterwards. But I am very glad that they changed.

“The rhymed quatrains that the poem is written in are a standard poetic form, though the mix of slant rhymes with true rhymes suggests an underlying dissonance that ties in with the poem’s themes. The poem originally appeared in the online journal Umbrella and was later published in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Home Economics Class at Elgin Court School, St. Thomas, 1961” by Elgin County Archives is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

RHL, ‘Boy With Scab’

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The boy he’s always been still takes delight
In testing scabs on elbows, knees,
To see if fingernails can assert their right
To lift with satisfying ease
The lid from off the mystery healing box
And see the flesh beneath the skin
Where the wise body-mind slowly unlocks
Corpuscles and white pus within.
The hint of pain, like some itch that you scratch,
Is fun alongside look-and-see.
What does the boy do with that useless patch,
The scab? Easy: autophagy.

*****

Curiosity is a useful aspect of intelligence. This poem first published in Lighten Up Online (aka LUPO). Thanks, Jerome Betts!

Photo: “War Stories” by Noël Zia Lee is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Morri Creech, ‘Mileage’

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The car mechanic’s counting out his bills
behind the E-Z Mart at one a.m.;
he’ll toss rocks at beer bottles just for thrills
until his dealer comes, it’s fine with him.

He draws in a deep breath and sees the light
swerve from the highway, puzzling the back wall
he leans against just to keep out of sight.
A quarter bag and some fentanyl, that’s all.

His phone vibrates again though nothing’s wrong.
For two years he’s been living in a trailer
with a girl who works at Publix. They get along
even if sometimes she says he’s a failure—

what can he say to that? Sure. He lives cheap.
They’ll fight until she forces a decision,
then roll around on the couch. Once she’s asleep
he’ll take a dose and watch some television.

At night he dreams of cylinders and sprockets,
the trucks and cars too busted up to fix;
startled awake, eyes aching in their sockets,
he’ll watch the clock hands grope their way to six.

A car pulls up but he can see it’s not
his hookup. Just kids with nothing else to do
but drink a six-pack in the parking lot
before they head out to the lake to screw.

He had his share of mischief, too, Lord knows.
The girls don’t eye him in the check-out aisle
much anymore, the ones with painted toes.
A few years back, at least, they used to smile.

The boys can see the grease that stains his hands;
they all think, damn, who wants to work that hard?
He spends the day beneath their dads’ sedans
while they play tackle football in the yard.

Chasing a football blew out both his knees
and broke his wrist. That was three years ago.
Customers say, “go Stags,” and toss their keys,
then look at him real close as if they know.

A text says no one’s coming. The BP sign
flickers over the pumps, and though it’s half-
past two now, and he’s tired, he’s feeling fine
enough to think it’s all a bust, and laugh.

And, anyway, it’s good to be alone
with the gas fumes and blinking traffic light
and fifteen missed calls lighting up his phone.
Later, he thinks, once he and his girl fight,

and once she falls asleep on his left arm,
he’ll stare at the divots on the ceiling tile
and wait to hear the clock sound its alarm
while the night’s odometer counts one more mile.

*****

Morri Creech comments: “As Mark Strand once said, I write to find out what I have to say. I don’t start a poem with an idea; I start with a line, an image, a rhetorical stance. Then I write in search of context: how can I situate this in a situation, a narrative moment, an argument, a meditation? The language takes me wherever I end up. This poem was constructed like that. I started with a first line and then wrote toward trying to figure out the context of the line. In this case, it led me to a character sketch. It was fine to discover what this character was about; the decisions I made about his character and circumstances were largely directed by rhymes. They steered me in what I hope was the right direction.”

Morri Creech is the author of five collections of poetry, including the Sleep of Reason, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Blue Rooms, and The Sentence (published by LSU Press, and which includes this poem). A recipient of NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships, as well as North Carolina and Louisiana Artists Grants, he teaches at Queens University of Charlotte.
www.morricreech.com

Photo: “Let’s Talk Tires” by gfpeck is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

John Claiborne Isbell, ‘Mousse au chocolat’

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Rita is in her summer dress. She’s got
the mixer out and she is hard at work
perfecting home-made mousse au chocolat.
I for my part am typing like a clerk
 
at my computer. Rita’s got cacao
and mascarpone and banana, all
to form her own concoction. And just now,
she brings a spoon to sample it. You’d call
 
her labor sui generis – you won’t
turn up this recipe. And yet, the tongue
delights – the eyes close – as the do or don’t
of custom pales. The mousse is made. I’ve sung
 
my wife in her blue dress with its red spots,
I’ve sung the kitchen where she takes her ease –
the house’s heart, with all its pans and pots.
I’ve sung the afternoon. Bring more of these.

*****

John Claiborne Isbell writes: ” ‘Mousse au chocolat’ is a true story inspired by my wife Rita’s taste for improvisation when cooking. The results are invariably delicious. As for the form, it’s just four quatrains of iambic pentameter. My volume Allegro is light verse; I ought really to write more of it.”

‘Mousse au chocolat’ was published in Snakeskin 321, October 2024.

John Claiborne Isbell is a writer and now-retired professor currently living in Paris with his wife Margarita. Their son Aibek lives in California with his wife Stephanie. John’s first book of poetry was Allegro (2018), with a cello on the cover and available on Amazon; he also publishes literary criticism, for instance An Outline of Romanticism in the West (2022) and Destins de femmes: Thirty French Writers, 1750-1850 (2023) both available free online. John spent thirty-five years playing Ultimate Frisbee, representing France in the European Championships in 1991, and finds it difficult not to dive for catches any more.

An Outline of Romanticism in the West https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0302

Destins de femmes: Thirty French Writers, 1750-1850  https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0346

Staël, Romanticism and Revolution: The Life and Times of the First European  https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stael-romanticism-and-revolution/E808497413C10F2814375C7CF131E221

Photo: “Mousse au chocolat” by eric.delcroix is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.