Tag Archives: couplets

Using form: Couplets: Barbara Lydecker Crane, ‘Secret Adages’

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“Write nothing down in ink” is the secret’s first rule;
“You promise not to tell?” said the secret’s first fool.

A secret’s likely safe if entrusted to a stranger;
one who knows no English will further lessen danger.

Don’t hide a guilty secret no other person knows;
like mold behind a ceiling, a spreading fester shows.

Secrets may be sweet, too delicious not to share.
To savor them together might double tempting fare.

Revealing every secret, a link to each regret,
will drain away a soul to an empty fishing net.

“Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.”
. . . but more about the bodies, Ben Franklin never said.

*****

Barbara Lydecker Crane writes: “Sometimes when I am casting around for new ideas to write about, I browse Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.  That’s how this one got started; the rest is classified information!” (But it is known that the poem was first published in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.)

Barbara Lydecker Crane was a finalist for two recent Rattle Poetry Prizes. She has received two Pushcart nominations and various awards from the Maria W. Faust and the Helen Schaible Sonnet Contests. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Ekphrastic Review, First Things, Light, THINK, Valparaiso Literary Review, Writer’s Almanac, many others, and in several anthologies. Her fourth collection, You Will Remember Me (ekphrastic, persona sonnets) was recently published by Able Muse Press, and is available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/You-Will-Remember-Me-Ekphrastic/dp/1773491261. Barb lives with her husband near Boston.

Photo: “The Secret” by CEBImagery.com is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Barbara Lydecker Crane: ‘The African Elephants’ Report’

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Small herds of Two-Legs roll across the plain
and stop to stare at us in our domain.

They rumble in their giant metal hunks,
which belch the fumes that irritate our trunks.

These creatures demonstrate a lack of strength.
They seldom run, nor walk for any length.

We assume their eyesight is defective:
the flat things that they click must be corrective.

Why do they retreat from every shower,
since rain-washed hide will dry within the hour?

When darkness comes these creatures enter tents
and miss the night-shift intrigue of events.

As for their young, we’ve spotted precious few—
a doubtful future, from our point of view.

We shake our heads when Two-Leg herds arrive.
We have concluded they will not survive.

*****

Barbara Lydecker Crane writes: “I wrote this while looking at videos of wildlife in Tanzania – in one, an elephant was peering into a tent with excited humans inside, whispering and filming; I had fun imagining that the elephant had been sent by his herd on a reconnaissance mission, and would report back to them.”

Barbara Lydecker Crane, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist in 2017 and  2019, has received two Pushcart nominations and several awards.  Her poems have appeared in Ekphrastic Review, First Things, Light, Measure, THINK, and many others.  Her fourth collection, entitled You Will Remember Me (sonnets in the imagined voices of artists through history, with many color images of artwork) is about to be published by Able Muse Press. 

Photo: “Addo Elephant Park, South Africa” by exfordy is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Using form: couplets: George Simmers, ‘Trigger Warning’

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Reading this do not expect
An unconditional respect

This poem is an unsafe space
You may be told things to your face

This poem may not feel the need
To be polite about your creed

It may not think your origins
Excuse your weaknesses or sins

It maybe will not lend its voice
To validate your lifestyle choice

It may resist attempts to curb
Its power to worry or disturb

It may not think its task to be
To flatter your identity

Although its author’s male and white
It may perhaps assert the right

To speak of gender and of race.
This poem is an unsafe space

*****

George Simmers continues to be amazed and amused by the warnings that some University lecturers seem to think it essential to give their students.  He writes: “Last week there was a warning that Jane Austen’s novels contain some outdated sexual attitudes. The week before that, students thinking of taking a course on tragedy needed to be told that it might contain references to violence and other disturbing themes. The week before that someone was worried that Peter Pan contained material that some students might find it hard to cope with. Why is this? Are the lecturers afraid of legal action from the helicopter parents who are the plague of some University departments today? Or do they really feel that their students are all delicate blossoms? Or do the warnings reflect their own discomfort with the canonical material they are obliged to teach? In the past people often did not think or behave the way that responsible modern people think they should have. It must be worrying.”

Editor’s comments: Poems written as a string of rhyming couplets can quickly start to feel mechanical and boring, but they are very effective when a straightforward list of ideas is being presented, as in this poem by Simmers. ‘The Latest Decalogue‘ by Arthur Hugh Clough is a classic of good usage (and also a classic of “unsafe space”).

George Simmers used to be a teacher; now he spends much of his time researching literature written during and after the First World War. He has edited Snakeskin since 1995. It is probably the oldest-established poetry zine on the Internet. His work appears in several Potcake Chapbooks. ‘Trigger Warning’ is from his ‘Old and Bookish‘ collection of poems.
https://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com/
http://www.snakeskinpoetry.co.uk/

Photo: “trigger warning” by lostcosmonaut is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: Couplets: Maryann Corbett, ‘Fugue in October’

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Baroque chamber ensemble and homeless encampment, Saint Paul

Perfect: the singers, strings, and keyboards. Perfect
Bruised sky above the tents of the squatters’ district
the little jewel-box church, its bright acoustic
calm in the year’s last mildness, the only music
softened a little in the candles’ lighting,
the mumbling underpass. The wind. No fighting
for this is God’s mind, woven of harmonies
for once. Tonight, for once, no one ODs—
and our souls thread through the flame of the vigil lamp
 someone got lucky at the entrance ramp
as we hold, hold to Monteverdi’s line
 (panhandling, on this warm day, with a sign)
and stop our breath until the last string dies
 and parcels out his manna of salty fries
in the last great chord of his Beatus vir
 while sirens wail some sorrow, far from here.

*****

Editor’s comments: “In case it isn’t clear from whatever device you are reading this on, each couplet here is comprised of a line about a musical ensemble in a church followed by a line about a homeless encampment under a highway. You can read it straight through as a soft-voiced line followed by a harsher one; or you can read every other line in one voice and the remaining lines in a different voice; either way, you are blending two very different aspects of city life into a larger, richer picture of community sharing, whether in glamour or squalor. This is an unusual and remarkably effective use of rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter.
The contrast built into the poem, and the skill with which it was done, made it a natural poem for inclusion in the ‘City! Oh City!‘ Potcake chapbook. It first appeared in Measure Review; and is included in the collection In Code.“

Maryann Corbett writes: “Events that trigger a poem need not be as simultaneous as the poem makes them seem. The choral concert in this poem took place on a subzero night during the Christmas season; the rise of homeless encampments occurred at a warmer time of year–but both could be happening in my city at any time, and they probably still are.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creating of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks, five full-length collections already published, and a forthcoming book. Her fifth book, In Code, contains the poems about her years with the Revisor’s Office. Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry 2018.

Her web page: http://maryanncorbett.com

Photo: “sleeping on the rock of ages” by waferboard is licensed under CC BY 2.0.