Heavens
A setting sun
whose work is done
lets colours run
from dark of night

The ancient stars
shine from afar
a sky of tar
timeless delight

The planets glow
their route they know
a steady glow
from dim to bright

They mark our days
our months, our ways
and always stay
within our sight

How Did It Go?

I found this format tricky and very constraining. Maybe it works better in Welsh. I did try the longer version but that just made it trickier.

Tim Fellows

Wind and leaves

The wind blows cold
and strips the gold
of trees grown old;
they have their dreams.

Like stars, leaves fall,
tossed by the squall
beyond recall,
in rust red streams.

Such wealth they’ve lost,
by tempest tossed,
I’d save from frost
had I the means.

In my palm held,
each coin tree-spelled,
gold treasure shelled,
leaf richly gleams.

How did it go?
It’s the first one I wrote, and I’ve written a couple more. It’s an addictive sort of form.
It’s a nice rhythmic concept. Works best, I think when the stanzas run on, something I’ll work on for next time.

Jane Dougherty

In Striations of A Struggle – (A Rhupunt)

One day after
Broken laughter
Falls to slaughter,
Climb your ladder.
Candle wax falls.

Seal up the room
Throw hand of runes
Sing the old tunes,
More times till soon.
Vocalist calls.

Wet spring will ring
More floods we sing,
We hug and cling
To summer’s fling.
Rest, wait in halls.

Autumn calls to
A clanging bell.
November of
Marionettes,
Shadows on walls.

How Did It Go?

Rhupunt is an old Welsh form, with fixed metre; an Ode metre (awdl) in the original Welsh language. Working with this form, a kind of dark, opaque sense emerged. My first encounter with this form, I had the sense of working in a forge, banging words as if one were hammering metal into pulsing form. I laid out the basic structure for end rhymes & four lines per stanza and created a four-stanza poem. At the end, I added the final lines & their secondary rhyming scheme. This final line enables a deepening of the music and vision of the created world, a kind of echoing call and response, a choral referent to the four lines above. I kept switching words around though I stayed with the initial, intuitive end rhyme. I felt a need to strengthen the images. It’s a very compact form; each line only allowed 4 syllables. I tried to move between single syllable words and compound words when possible, again, to increase the music and mood, and as a final gesture, added points of punctuation. I’m happy with the result, an almost abstract, third-person public song form for a dark season – Robert Frede Kenter http://www.icefloepress.net

Robert Frede Kenter

Bios and linksa

Robert Frede Kenter is a Pushcart nominated poet, editor, visual artist, multiple grant recipient & EIC/Publisher of Ice Floe Press http://www.icefloepress.net. Recent publications incl. EDEN (2021), work in the Anthology, The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press, 2022), work forthcoming in the Anthology, Seeing in Tongues (Steel Incisors, 2023), and recent journals incl. Acropolis, CutbowQ, Feral, Erato, WatchYrHead, Anthropocene, Scissors & Spackle, Anti-Heroin Chic. Robert lives in Toronto with CFS/ME, sometimes sidelined, never out of the game. Twitter: @frede_kenter, IG: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle.