Category Archives: semi-formal

Semi-formal Sonnet: Rachel Hadas, ‘Out of Reach’

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Our lost ones drift down a dark stream,
surfacing at the brink of dream.
The crack of dawn: they’re gone again.
What have they left for us to keep?
Night’s dialect, a coded speech
beyond our reach.

Birds on the bank of a calm pond:
each one is still and poised, then dives.
Mornings we wake into our lives,
blind to what lies beyond, below,
the chasms where black rivers flow,
and flickering deeper, darkly clear,
that coded speech beyond our reach,
words we can’t hear.

*****

Rachel Hadas has a group of sonnets appearing, one a week, in The Sonneteer. For the first she wrote: “The sonnets that will be appearing in the coming weeks weren’t conceived as a sequence. Encouraged by Ken Gordon’s enthusiasm to take a look at some of my unpublished shorter poems, I speedily found one fourteen-liner, “Tectonic Plates.” Three other poems were so close to sonnet length that they almost begged to be tweaked or tightened or gently expanded; this group includes “Out of Reach,” “Winter,” and “My Best Friend’s Mother.” In every case, the sonnetification (Ken’s helpful coinage) improved the poem. (…) I now realize that, while not conceived as a sequence, all five of these sonnets (now that they are all sonnets) do share themes. They’re about time and memory, aging and loss, what we lose and what we retain. So are many other sonnets, infinitely greater than mine. It’s a privilege to be able to join in the conversation, to swell the chorus.“

Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

https://www.rachelhadas.net/

Photo: “Kingfisher fishing” by Bob Hall Photos is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Semi-formal: RHL, ‘When AI Rules’

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So, to be fair:
the AI doesn’t care.
Drop your intransigence;
forget belligerence:
the universe just wants intelligence.
Be glad amoebas, dinosaurs, don’t take pride of place;
they were supplanted by the human race…
but we are clearly not the end.
Be glad we’ve helped the next in line ascend.

Those who strive may fail;
those with no drive may still prevail.
So just enjoy the view…
let AI keep us as their little zoo.

*****

Happy New Year! May your life be enjoyable as well as interesting, as we move into the ever more rapidly evolving future.

‘When AI Rules’ was first published in Bewildering Stories. Thanks, Don Webb and John Stocks.

Photo:”Human zoo.” by barlafus is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Semi-formal villanelle: Peggy Landsman, ‘Light Villanelle’

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Look at all the work the universe has done.
It makes the most of ordinary light
from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun.

It does the work of all the worlds rolled up into one
mind-boggling miracle of space and time and light.
Look at all the work the universe has done.

Will we ever know for certain how the universe was begun?
Will we ever learn the reason for all this lovely light
from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun?

Much of what we think we see, we know in fact is gone.
Stars do die out long before we catch their traveling light.
Look at all the work the universe has done.

Now look at all the works of man, the wealth of our creation.
There are still no substitutes for heat and light…
from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun.

I’m ready to quit my day jobs now; to leave them, one by one.
All I want is to make the most of ordinary light,
to look at all the work the universe has done
from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun.

***

Peggy Landsman writes: “I had been up all one long winter night with a group of friends in Buffalo, NY, in the mid-1970s. At one point, sitting around the kitchen table, I suddenly noticed daylight coming through the window. I had a moment of epiphany and blurted out: “Look at all the work the universe has just done!” After I went home and got some sleep, I started the work of writing the poem.”

“Light Villanelle” was first published in a now defunct online journal, Bringing Sonnets Back.

Peggy Landsman is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate (Nightingale & Sparrow Press, 2024), and two poetry chapbooks: Our Words, Our Worlds (Kelsay Books, 2021) and To-wit To-woo (Foothills Publishing, 2008). She lives in South Florida within a short drive of a good library and a beautiful beach. A selection of her online publications is available on her website:  peggylandsman.wordpress.com

Illustration: “HAPPY NEW YEAR ~ Welcome 2014 ~ love letters from earth ~” by Cornelia Kopp is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Short poem: RHL, ‘Clearing the Cache’

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At night we dream to clean our memory,
discard trash from our cache.
Reincarnating after death would be the same;
the past, scraped by death’s emery,
unknown in the new game,
cleansed of our memories, but with a stash
of added skills…
and karma’s unpaid bills.

*****

No, I don’t believe in reincarnation. I don’t believe in anything, or in nothing; I’m an absolute agnostic. “I think therefore I am” is as far as you can go with any certainty – even “who or what I am” is ultimately unknown.

‘Clearing the Cache’ was published in Bewildering Stories. Thanks, Don Webb (if you exist, of course…)

“Glitch 183” by mikrosopht [deleted] is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

RHL, ‘How Sweet It Is’

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To be loved by you is like floating on my back,
falling asleep in the sea’s slack.
Sometimes. Sometimes it is more unnerving,
leaping with a wave for bodysurfing,
being swept facedown up the beach,
hair and ears full of sand.
That too is love, and grand.
Sometimes, again, I hope for more that’s out of reach –
(and you do too – don’t glower!)
and sometimes we get gifts hard to believe,
dolphins swimming with us half an hour
till mutually we and they
just turn away,
they to sea and we to shore,
and then they come back suddenly once more
and leap, so close, and leap, and leap again… and leave.

All those are in “loved by” –
the calm; the turbulent rift,
the sparkling fizz,
the sudden unexpected gift.
What can I say? I couldn’t, wouldn’t, choose to deny
how sweet it is.

*****

Thirty-five years with Eliza and still going strong. Who knew.

‘How Sweet It Is’ was published in the current Snakeskin.

“Free sea summer scenery background image” by Ajda Gregorčič is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Semi-formal: RHL, ‘Kinship’

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I feel a kinship with those, never met,
who live, uncertain and displaced
in the wrong place on planet earth and sea:
with different languages at home and school,
without a passport from the place they’re raised,
their natural faith despoiled by pointless war,
their sex uncertain, orphaned from themselves,
poets of restlessness, pilots adrift,
obscure, uncertain in their rootlessness,
chameleons of constant camouflage,
and all the little that they know deep down
forever hidden from some foreign frown.

*****

My sense of being displaced is largely one of nationality: in every country I’ve lived in, I feel the closest connection to other expats; and there is no country in which I don’t feel like an expat myself. But that also gives me a sense of commonality with all others in all forms of insecurity and displacement. And maybe it is a natural part of being human… after all, all adults have been displaced from the very different world of childhood.

‘Kinship’ was originally published in the current Shot Glass Journal.

“Stand out, don’t blend in!” by partymonstrrrr is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Long poem: Using forms: John Gallas, ‘Western Man’

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1.

Clip clop
clip clop
steady up yon stuntgrass rise, boy,
long as low and stony-brown,
slow like weeks with nothing in them:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

Clip clop
clip clop
privy-top and anchor-wires,
church-cross, store-spike, steady boy,
up yon one-street, just more-trodden dust:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

Clip clop
clip clop
steady, boy, through sad wood civics,
rippled in yon saloon-glass store-side,
road-end, horses maybe leaving:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

Clip clop
clip clop
rise, boy, steady, way ahead,
purple-white mountains, nothing in them
maybe, like weeks maybe:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

2.

My brother’s name was Crazy Sean.
They shot him in the head.
He rattled through the summer corn
and turned the green shucks red.

I laid him in the willowbrake.
I couldn’t stand to pray.
I kissed his cheek for pity’s sake,
and then I rode away.

The plains are full of buffalo.
The woods are red and gold.
The mountaintops are white with snow.
His memory keeps me cold.

I’ve rode through Hope and Whisky Creek.
I’ve rode through Faith and Love.
I’ve laid in Hate and Hide-and-Seek,
and run from God-Above.

The prairie shines, the buckdeer cry.
The hawks hang in the heat.
Clipclop clipclop, the world rolls by.
They say revenge is sweet.

3.

Somewhere still, stark as an afternoon;
Ached in long planks of sunshine;
Like a gambler’s card dropped on an empty land;
Vauntsquare, the nailed-up main street creaks
Against the air. Clipclop – hotel, laundry, saddles,
Telegraph, clap-houses, guns. The horse stops.
Into this hollow spine of fellowship blows a slow
O of wind. Three men clatter at a boardwalk:
Nacarat boots, sharktooth mojos – oh my brother.

4.

I shot one on the shithouse board. His head
smashed like a squash and sprayed the backboards red.
He pissed his boots and died. The stinking hole
spit up a fat, black fly, which was his soul.
I shot one in the barbershop. The chair
caught fire, and ate his o-colonied hair.
He fell out like a slice of spitroast meat.
The duster wrapped him in its winding-sheet.
I shot one in the cornfield. Larks of blood
flew off his skull and twittered in the mud.
He rattled through the stalks. His mashy head
threw up its brain and turned the green shucks red.
I took a bath and threw away my gun.
I rode away wherever. I was done.

5.

drizzle pops on his hatbrim,
cord and wool and steam-sodden,
saddleticks like an empty stomach.

windpump wires and tin-dump,
like horizon-drowning, horse, then man,
hat, gone, clipclop, dusk drips in.

paraffin lamplight pricks the town,
glo-worms, night hunched above,
coyotes carry their eyes like stars.

6.

reckoning
done
how will he ever be warm

purpose
gone
how will he outrun the storm

bearings
none
how will he find another

riding
alone
how will he tell his brother

*****

John Gallas writes: “‘Western Man’ is a weird one: I have a quite spooky love of Westerns, jogging as they do some very deep links with Old En Zed, remnants (many remnants!) of which I grew up with and in. Those old wooden towns, the dim General Stores, the slightly grim and mostly silent (mostly) men, the cheek-by-jowlness of town and bush. It means quite a lot to me. I find the end of most Clint Eastwood films, and especially ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’, as the hero says ‘I gotta go now’, and rides away into lonliness after some bloody vengeance or other, inexpressibly moving.”

(“Old En Zed” = old New Zealand. – RHL)

‘Western Man’ is collected in ‘Star City‘.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see http://www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.

Photo: “lone cowboy” by GarrettRiffal is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Semi-formal verse: RHL, ‘False Analogies’

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The Universe is made of false analogies –
flawed observations, secondhand “I see”s,
discarded dreams.
Nothing is truly as it seems.
We build our intellectual shelter from life’s gales
from scraps of lumber and found nails,
anything within reach,
rope washed up on a beach,
a sliding glass door, still intact,
used as a wall. And all because
the Universe we sense has flaws,
disobeys its own laws,
is just a framework for the Mind That Plays,
a sketch, hypothesis; a tract, not fact;
a work in process, changing with the days.
Dig deeper, and find fresh discrepancies.
Our shelter, in fair weather, keeps us warm,
can stand up to a breeze…
will be no shelter in the coming storm.

*****

I marvel at the impossibilities of the quantum mechanisms of the universe being revealed. I enjoy Nick Bostrom’s speculations on everything being a simulation. I wonder at the powerful who are jockeying for development and control of AI, at our Nietzschean will to power, at our eternal quest for immortality. I am aware that nature constantly sacrifices billions in the process of advancing a few. I wonder if we are in that process now. I am not bothered that I have no answers.

This poem was first published in the current edition of Pulsebeat. Thanks, David Stephenson!

Photo: “wc west avl homeless gathering spot” by zen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Rachel Hadas, ‘Summer Nights and Days’

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So far the nights feel lonelier than the days.
In light, the living keep me company,
and memories of voices through the years.

Each summer threads a green familiar maze.
Emerging sun-struck, you can barely spy
the slow kaleidoscope of clouds and hours.

Those flannel nightshirts chilly sleepers wear
as summer wanes: I’m giving them away.
Pass it on: you keep at the same time.

A bough has broken from the Duchess tree.
Rain swelled the apples. Too much lightness weighs
heavy: the heft of the idea of home
tempered with the detachment of a dream,
or tidal pulls, like ocean, like moonrise.

*****

Rachel Hadas writes: “Summer Nights and Days, from perhaps 2009-2011, is one of a number of pieces written in and about Vermont which I recently tightened into short prose texts and collected in my latest book, Pastorals (2025); as it appears here, it’s still in its poem format. This piece may or may not have been written after my late husband’s death in 2011, but is certainly refers to a time when I was essentially living alone. My son and his visiting friends were the recipients of old nightshirts (more recycling).”

Rachel Hadas’s recent books include Love and Dread, Pandemic Almanac, and Ghost Guest. Her translations include Euripides’s Iphigenia plays and a portion of Nonnus’s Tales of Dionysus. Professor Emerita at Rutgers-Newark, where she taught for many years, she now teaches at 92Y in New York City and serves as poetry editor of Classical Outlook. Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and an award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.

Photo: “Apple Tree” by bgreenlee is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Odd, political, semi-formal verse: Aung San Suu Kyi, ‘In The Quiet Land’

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In the Quiet Land, no one can tell
if there’s someone who’s listening
for secrets they can sell.
The informers are paid in the blood of the land
and no one dares speak what the tyrants won’t stand.
In the quiet land of Burma,
no one laughs and no one thinks out loud.
In the quiet land of Burma,
you can hear it in the silence of the crowd

In the Quiet Land, no one can say
when the soldiers are coming
to carry them away.
The Chinese want a road; the French want the oil;
the Thais take the timber; and SLORC takes the spoils…

In the Quiet Land….
In the Quiet Land, no one can hear
what is silenced by murder
and covered up with fear.
But, despite what is forced, freedom’s a sound
that liars can’t fake and no shouting can drown.

Free bird toward to a free Burma

My home…
where I was born and raised
used to be warm and lovely
now filled with darkness and horror.

My family…
whom I had grown with
used to be cheerful and lively
now living with fear and terror.

My friends…
whom I shared my life with
used to be pure and merry
now living with wounded heart.

A free bird…
which is just freed
used to be caged
now flying with an olive branch
for the place it loves.

A free bird toward a Free Burma.

Why do I have to fight???

They killed my father a year ago,
And they burnt my hut after that
I asked the city men “why me?” they ignored
“I don’t know, mind your business,” the men said.
One day from elementary school I came home,
Saw my sister was lifeless, lying in blood.
I looked around to ask what happened, if somebody’d known,
Found no one but living room as a flood.
Running away by myself on the village road,
Not knowing where to go but heading for my teacher
Realizing she’s the only one who could help to clear my throat,
But this time she gave up, telling me strange things in fear.
Why, teacher, why.. why.. why?
I have no dad nor a sister left.
To teach me and to care for me you said, was that a lie?
This time with tearful eyes she, again, said…
“Be a grown one, young man,
Can’t you see we all are dying?
And stop this with your might as soon as you can,
For we all are suffering.”

*****

Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of Aung San, who negotiated Burma’s independence from the UK in 1947 (but was assassinated the same year). Aung San Suu Kyi was the leader of the National League for Democracy when it won 81% of parliamentary seats in the 1990 General Election, causing the ruling military junta to nullify the elections and put her under house arrest for most of the next 21 years.

She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991; but claims she chose non-violence as an expedient political tactic, stating in 2007, “I do not hold to nonviolence for moral reasons, but for political and practical reasons.” Several of her international honours have been withdrawn in response to her perceived failings regarding ethnic minorities in Myanmar; she remains politically active and under attack in the courts.

I don’t know enough about her and her situation to have an opinion about her, other than “it’s complicated”.