Tag Archives: irony

Using form: Couplets/Sonnet: Gail White, ‘Prayer Updated’

Leave a reply

To Anyone who still may be
attentive from Infinity,
we bless you from our dot in space
and thank you for our privileged place.

Give us this day on which to feed
a bit more gluten than we need,
and when we’re adequately fed,
help us to get and stay ahead
and save for our retirement
enough plus twenty-five per cent.

May old age find us cheerful still,
our life in order like our will,
with neither pain nor care nor debt.
Thy kingdom come, but not just yet.

*****

Gail White writes: “Religion and irony are not incompatible I find that a good deal of poetry comes from taking a speculative or questioning view of Bible stories (e.g, how did Adam and Eve react to the murder of Abel by Cain? We don’t hear a peep out of them about it.) And I’ve often said that if God hadn’t wanted at least one cynical feminist poet, I wouldn’t exist.”

‘Prayer Updated’ was published in the current issue of Lighten Up Online.

Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books ASPERITY STREET and CATECHISM and the chapbook SONNETS IN A HOSTILE WORLD are available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine. “Tourist in India” won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for 2013. Her poems have appeared in the Potcake Chapbooks ‘Tourists and Cannibals’, ‘Rogues and Roses’, ‘Families and Other Fiascoes’, ‘Strip Down’ and ‘Lost Love’.

Illustration: “Global Prayer” by thorntonsdigital is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Weekend read: Tom Vaughan, ‘Rhyme-Crime’

4 Replies

Does rhyme matter –
    however occasional?

It used to be
    considered vocational

a must for verse’s
    inspirational

impact, even
    educational –

but these days, it’s a
    generational

sign your stuff’s just
    recreational.

*****

Tom Vaughan writes: “For me, rhyme is not just a technical trick to help make poetry memorable. I think the world rhymes in odd ways. I also believe time rhymes, across the centuries but also in our short individual lives, sometimes in irony, but more often – if we listen hard enough to hear it – to point the way to a deeper level of challenge and reflection.”

Editor: I had been planning a rant on the essence of poetry being all the tricks that make it memorisable word-for-word: rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, etc; and on the fact that the bits of poems an adult remembers are invariably rhymed; and on poetry’s links to dance and song and the prenatal heartbeat. But Tom Vaughan introduces a whole new layer of value of rhyme, obliquely in his poem, incompletely in his comment. There are things to meditate on here.

Tom Vaughan is not the real name of a poet whose previous publications include a novel and three poetry pamphlets (A Sampler, 2010, and Envoy, 2013, both published by HappenStance; and Just a Minute, 2024, from Cyberwit). His poems have been published in a range of poetry magazines, including several of the Potcake Chapbooks and frequently in Snakeskin.
He currently lives in Brittany.
https://tomvaughan.website

Photo: “Sometimes, I like going back into #poetry and pretending like I am still in college. #johnkeats #bookstagram #annotations #reading #books” by alis.smith is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Sonnet: “Flags We Have Feared”

Leave a reply

The Swastika, that ancient Vedic sign,
the lightning wheels with which the Aryan bands
in lightning war overrun other lands,
wheeled juggernauts that crush, self-claimed divine.
Hammer and Sickle, commoners’ work-tools;
weapons for rising up, and tearing down
the castle of the rich, the bourgeois town;
fake honour to the poor the Party rules.
A flag with Stripes, memorial for flogged slaves,
striped jail clothes for resulting underclass;
and Stars like bullets through the windshield’s glass
for leaders by the CIA shot down,
star earned for each election overthrown,
star for each land the flag invades, or ‘saves’.

This sonnet was originally and ironically published in Ambit in the UK. The irony being, of course, that the Union Jack is viewed by much of the world with as much fear and hostility as any of the other three flags. But you don’t learn that, or the reasons for it, in school in the UK–at least not in England. The British (at least the English) have a warm and fuzzy feeling toward their flag, and are innocent or puzzled that anyone else should find it negative. Similarly in the times of the other three flags, the Germans (at least the Aryans), the Soviets (at least the Russians) and the Americans (at least the whites) have been happy and proud of their flag, puzzled that anyone else should fear or dislike it.

Another irony: the jury is still out on to what extent one of the leaders shot down by the CIA was their own.

Technically it’s a sonnet with a non-standard rhyme scheme: ABBA CDDC EFFGGE. But the rhymes and the scansion are OK. As for the volta, the requisite turn of mood or argument between the octave and the sestet… well, after dealing with the two great enemies of western democracy, you weren’t expecting me to pick on the US, were you?