I hope your life will offer you new opportunities,
that you will find contentment in the choices that you seize.
Remember family’s important. You can count on us,
especially when the way of life is hard and mountainous.
Remember to believe in goodness, when you’re down and out.
Remember never to give in to misery and doubt.
Remember wisdom comes with love and flourishes in life,
but it takes strength for father, mother, husband, child or wife.
The world has enormous wealth, but it takes eyes to see…
that…each of us is only part of all…humanity.
*A ten-nos, the word sonnet written backwards, is a poem of ten lines (five couplets) of iambic heptameter that I have created. A sonnet is frequently 14 lines of 10 syllables; a ten-nos is 10 lines of 14 syllables.
Featured Image: “Father and Son” by Warren Chang.
Very ingenious, I like it!!
I am really liking the rhythm of these new “ten-nos” poems. The messages are also very upright and good.
The tennos opposes the sonnet in at least four ways:
it extends the lengths of the lines;
it leaves open the ending as opposed to a strong conclusion;
it easily allows for a larger canvas, such as the dodeca, et al;
it falls naturally into the ballad, making a more prosaic shift simultaneously.
Having written hundreds of tennos (both singular and plural), one of the nice things I have noticed about the tennos is it serves as a building block for all kinds of structures. Here are two recent examples, a tennos, and a dodeca:
The Sun Continues Beating Down
by Ra Bué Weel Disc
The Sun beats down upon the City in the afternoon.
It is so hot. the wasps come out, to build their hives anew.
The heat has chased the wild life into the shadows made.
The birds inhabit leafy trees on perches in the shade.
One longs for windy gusts of air to blow on past one’s face.
One watches jet airliners pass above in cooler space.
One’s thankful for the air-conditioning one has at home,
along with the revolving fans that turn in rapid mo.
The Sun continues beating down upon the neighbourhoods,
for all the cloudless, sunny days one has to pay one’s dues.
Ra Bué Weel Disc is a poet of the Solar Disk.
On to Better Days
by Usa W. Celebride
In this 250th year of the USA,
this nation of 340 million goes its way.
Which way that is, nobody knows. How could somebody know?
There are too many individuals to make that so.
Each person has life, liberty, pursuing happiness,
and goes about their lives the best they’re able, more or less.
Yet freedom in a land, like this, is hard to comprehend;
where one feels bound, another bounds off to some other end.
And happiness means many things to many people too;
where one is thankful for one’s life, one has another view.
And yet despite all of Time’s changes, the Republic stays,
its people hoping that it will go on to better days.
Usa W. Celebride is a poet of America.
Well put, Bruce. On to better days! The poem is a fine contribution to this year’s celebration. Many of the poems entered in the competition expressed unease about the current situation, yet went on with confidence and hope for the future. Your program is a little different. You refer to the normal unknown contingencies and divisions that are always present among human beings. That seems to take “Better Days” back to the thoughts you expressed years ago in “A Father’s Poem,” giving family as the stabilizing and supportive factor. May a common American family feeling enable most of us somehow to assist one another as we move on.
I’m not sure why, but every now and then, an older poem of mine pops up on my SCP feed. In those cases, I read them over again, and sometimes respond. That is what I have done here.
As to the dodeca, because it is British NeoClassical in its abstraction, I prefer the Coats-inspired “David Humphreys”, which speaks specifically on an American patriot.
As to Ms. Coats recent literary criticism on translating Petrarca, I am reminded throughout of the high quality she demonstrates in her own translations, which I prefer.