Showing posts with label villanelle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label villanelle. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

It is Ours to Dance...




Poetic Bloomings challenges us to write a villanelle

The villanelle is 19-line poem consisting of 5 tercets and a final quatrain. It requires no set meter, nor number of syllables per line. It carries a pattern of only two rhyme sounds (ABA in 5 tercets, and then ABAA in final quatrain). The first and third lines of the first tercet repeat alternately as a refrain closing the succeeding stanzas, and rejoin as the final couplet of the quatrain.

A Villanelle

We cannot choose our sunshine or our rain
Its fusion orchestrated by love’s most perfect Hand
It is ours to dance; lest heaven plays its melody in vain

To crave a minuet of past refrain
Is but to miss the chorus He has planned
We cannot choose our sunshine or our rain

He tunes Time’s dulcimer; its temporal strain
Touched by One whose thought we cannot understand
It is ours to dance; lest heaven’s plays its melody in vain

Now high, now low, the harmony of pleasure and of pain
Sweeps soulfully across the sea and land
We cannot choose our sunshine or our rain

It is not ours to object His choice refrain
The Maestro of life’s orchestra directs His precious band
It is ours to dance lest heaven plays its melody in vain

Too soon the music fades from earthbound plain
It is not ours to know the why or understand
We cannot choose our sunshine or our rain
It is ours to dance; lest heaven plays its melody in vain

© Janet Martin