the masnavi or mathnawi,

The guidelines:

Couplet (or two-line) form…
…but with the qualifier that each “line” is actually a “half-line” and that they rhyme horizontally
Each line is 10 or 11 syllables long (I believe it’s supposed to be consistent within the poem, so pick a number and stick with it)
Rhyme scheme is aa/bb/cc/dd and so on
No line length restrictions
I

Many examples of masnavi are very long poems. One of the more popular examples is Rumi’s Masnavi-ye-Ma’navi, which is a long spiritual or mystical poem.

Thankyou to the Writers Digest for this information.

Helpful Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathnawi

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/masnavi-or-mathnawi-poetic-forms

Masnavi Poem Type

Night hours

In the heart of rolling dark
recall the comfort of hands,
the pulse in another’s neck,
the flagrance of sea breeze salting dusty land.

How Did It Go?

I found this short form quite difficult. The last line, being longer, is therefore freighted with meaning, and involved many rewrites. I think this form requires skills of brevity and punch I have not developed.

Lesley Curwen

Those who are gone

I can hear you in the wind
in the way the fox-bells chime,
the keening of survivors
the harrowing, dearth and the sorrowing time.

You were all around me once,
in the warm breath of the spring,
In the flight of birds, too high
to see their bright plumage, hear their voices sing.

You were young and old, lovely,
rainbows, storm-light in your eyes,
you sang the words, I listened,
to the ever-changing torrent, always wise.

Now there’s snow in the meadow,
no bird-sound, but all around,
the touch of dead hands wringing,
lips that murmur in the dark of holy ground.

Years turning

When will I see you again?
In the greening of the year
or at its turning? When snow
lies cold, unforgiving, and I wait, yearning?

For the years will keep turning,
russet red then green again,
and the road remains empty,
though my wishes throng the trees, leaf-stars aging.

To have wings

Black these cold and lightless days,
dirt-grey the clouds, sun rayless,
white the frost that furs the dead
leaf litter, that lies deer-scraped,
brown and rotting.

I wish a bird would lend me
the magic of feathered dance
night or day uncaring, I’d
toss these sorrows in the sea,
watch them drowning.

How did it go?

I got a bit carried away with this one, because I enjoyed the form. The endecha (usually plural endechas) is a poem of Medieval Spanish Jewish origin, a lament intended to be sung. The stanzas are quatrains, of 7 7 7 and 11 syllables, rhyme scheme xaxa where x is unrhymed. It can be a full rhyme but is more usually consonance. I wrote one of each, a full rhyme endecha, and one using consonance instead. Since the poem is intended to be sung, it matters that the lines follow a rhythm which led me to write a fourth endecha with the stresses placed so that the final eleven syllable line can break naturally after seven syllables, leaving the final four syllables as a sort of plaintive echo. Given the origins of the poem, this seems like a reasonable interpretation.

Jane Dougherty

Sunset through a window
You place your soul on a shelf
Tired and fraught you sit
On the floor is an empty shadow of yourself

How Did It Go?

This was my first time attempting to write an endecha poem and it was rather difficult but fun to try. While the rhyming pattern was similar to today’s poetry, I don’t believe my verse could be sung like a traditional endecha. Hopefully I captured a moment of lament.

Aaron
@VikingRaven78

Righteous
after Miguel Hernandez – “Adiós, hermanos, camaradas y amigos.
Despedidme del sol y de los trigos”

Final breaths rattle; chains tie
more skin than flesh, you have lost
your battle as war rages
far away, where others also bear the cost.
As you scrawl your final words
on prison walls, death trains roll.
In fascist plays, roles are cast,
innocents despatched, and Europe pays the toll.

Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends:
my own fate is surely sealed;
I tried, I failed, now it’s time
to let me take my leave of sun and fields.
Breath has gone, cold lungs at rest;
eastward iron wheels still spin.
Leaders play their games of chess
but with fortitude, a righteous heart will win.

How Did It Go?

As this is a Spanish form, and a lament, I used the Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez as inspiration. He died of neglected tuberculosis in a Spanish jail in 1942, effectively murdered by Franco’s fascist regime. Elsewhere the Nazis were rounding up and murdering Jews (and others) and this also tied in to Holocaust Memorial Day. The form itself was surprisingly straightforward, albeit a little unbalanced.

Tim Fellows

Lament in the Time of Rain

Without hope, we struggle to
animate courage, waken
the heart’s grey beat in our chests,
everything we thought we knew had been taken

You stood at the door, in tears,
all was forgotten in mirrors,
memories spun through a loom,
tolling bells, life ending in complex powders

You were so young, so young, so
vibrant in Brussel’s Stomach
the grey wheel of rain falling
your restaurant plate filled with prawns and geddock

Stand forgotten, young, taken,
forgotten in time, so young,
the heart’s grey rain, uncertain,
inclement shadows pluck instruments, unstrung

How Did It Go?

Spent time (no pun intended) getting this poem to insinuate a café music; as soon as I read that it was a Spanish lament, the 15th century Endecha, (3 lines of 7 syllables, 4 line a/b/c/b rhyme stanza, line 4, 11 syllables) my goal / hope was to write something not too maudlin, and also linked armed stanzas, extended. It took time – successfully or not — to pull out tropes over-used, and move towards a diagonal, oblong precis on the loss of some variant of an urban high-life, of wine, song, stimulants, and old-school meter taxis, chased down in the rain. (After completing my work on this piece, I discovered, on further reading, the Endecha was a song form associated mostly with Sephardic Jews prior to and after their expulsion from Spain, at century’s end, which being my long-ago ancestor’s heritage, makes even more sense, an aha moment.)

Robert Frede Kenter

Bios and Links

Robert Frede Kenter

is a writer and visual artist. A Pushcart Nominee, published widely & internationally, based now in Canada, publisher of http://www.icefloepress.net. Tweets: @frede_kenter, IG:@r.f.k.vispocityshuffle

Lesley Curwen

is a broadcaster, poet and sailor living within sight of Plymouth Sound. Her poems have been published by Nine Pens, Arachne Press, Broken Sleep and GreenInk, and later this yea

Jane Dougherty

lives and works in southwest France. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems and stories have been published in magazines and journals including Ogham Stone, the Ekphrastic Review, Black Bough Poetry, ink sweat and tears, Gleam, Nightingale & Sparrow, Green Ink and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She blogs at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/ Her poetry chapbooks, thicker than water and birds and other feathers were published in October and November 2020.

Tm Fellows

is a writer from Chesterfield in Derbyshire whose ideas are heavily influenced by his background in the local coalfields, where industry and nature lived side by side. His first pamphlet “Heritage” was published in 2019. His poetic influences range from Blake to Owen, Causley to Cooper-Clarke and more recently the idea of imagistic poetry and the work of Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez.

FROM INFINITY THEY COME

a pigeon sits in the field,
I think it might be hurt,
I crouch down to get real close,
talking to it as it watched me
with lazy half-asleep eyes,
it does not fly away,
eventually I stand and step back,
it waddles a few paces, it was fine,
nothing wrong with it,
maybe it was just tired?
but it lets me get up so very close,
that for a moment we are attuned
on a deep psychic level, bird
to birdbrain psycho-chemistry,
so that my mind has wings,
so my mind takes flight,
feather-brain, beak for nose,
I peek out through its lazy half-asleep
eyes and see my own ludicrous self,
know for sure it’s me that’s frayed,
it’s me that’s damaged
I should have known it all along…

By Andrew Darlington

Peacocks

It’s just their eyes
that look like those
of their namesake,
and not the eyes
of butterfly or bird,
but the ringed spots
on the wings of each,
or rather the feathers
of the fowl. They don’t halloo,
rarely stand still or close up.
It’s not them we think of
when we hear the word,
really only for the male bird,
like we think of a pair of compasses
as a compass, meaning
the geometrical kind,
forgetting the other exists.
One large, one small,
one mostly red, the other blue.
They are as similar as
a Jerusalem artichoke to an artichoke,
peppercorns to capsicums
or a pear to an avocado pear.

Heron at Fishergreen

Is it the same bird, he wonders
as he stands on the bridge as still
as I do in Priest Lane ford. The same man
who was there when I came here before,
though this time he wears
a turquoise fleece not a black
winter coat. Will he know it is me
I ask myself, when I disappoint him
as I did last time, as he takes his phone,
searches for the camera. I’ll turn
my head, fly away not towards him
as he gets it in focus. If he zooms in I’ll be
a blur, a silhouette in reverse, a cartoon.
I will haunt this place for him like a ghost.

Curlew

In Wales they used to fear my call
like the sight of a magpie
or the sound of an afternoon cock crow.

I can’t imagine why they call me gylfinir
there, for it sounds nothing like
the noise I make, cur-lee.

Now they dread the thought
of my demise, rejoice
at my return to the Yorkshire Dales.

Some think my name means running,
which I never do at all. My beak
catches worms as chopsticks do noodles,

or a pair of tweezers pulls out
an unwanted hair, which when closed
it could be said to resemble. Curved.

Seagulls

They’re supposed to come
to the country in winter
not to the city in summer,
yet I am woken at 4 am
by their screeching.

It’s as if they know
they are in the wrong place,
lost, can’t find their way home,
like the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw
pleading ‘Let me in’.

Their wings are lit up by sunlight
in blue sky in the evenings
of early July, like goldfish
as they fly past my window
which I watch like a tank.

All four poems above my Peter Donnelly

Bios and Links

Peter J Donnelly

lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary.  He has a degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter.  His poetry has been published in various magazines and anthologies including Dreich, High Window,  Southlight,  Black Nore Review,  Obsessed with Pipework,  One Hand Clapping and Ink,  Sweat and Tears.  He won second prize in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition in 2021 and was a joint runner up in the Buzzwords open poetry competition in 2020.

Drudwen

I saw them once at Aberystwyth Pier,
before I knew what a murmuration was,
or even that they were starlings,
nevermind their Welsh name, or if they had one.
Again years later near the racecourse
as we walked by the canal.
Today they fly over your garden,
I was going to say like plumes of smoke
from your chiminea, then I see that
in fact it is smoke. When they come
in the other direction they are not camouflaged,
but like tea leaves in glass as the water’s poured,
or glitter in a snow globe.
It’s not their call you hear
but the flapping of their wings;
not the size of the flock that surprises,
but the birds themselves.

Fratercula Arctica

They call us sea parrots,
clowns of the sea. Yet we frown
like owls as we perch
on the cliff tops in spring, our beaks
newly orange like autumn leaves.

The Behaviour of the Birds

A duck sits still as a statue
in a city centre street,

a goose lays an egg
in the railway station.

A pigeon bangs against my window,
startles me less than a magpie

perched on a rooftop.
I forget to look away.

Even though the window’s shut
I still hear blackbirds chirp;

only the heron in the park
flies away when I try to take its photo.

All three poems by Peter Donnelly

Birds in the Garden

At first, it was one couple:
He with his bustle of storm clouds,
she a more demure gray, of doves maybe—
It was the doves that invited them, because
I was so generous with corn.
They tried to make children, and to hear her
cry at the broken nest
grief that echoes

And in the years where a yellow fluff would follow,
Such obvious humble pride.
the babies stay flightless fragile for months.

Every year, they reunite:
The sisters and cousins and
new babies fewer and fewer

So
years of food for them
Years of watching for yellow babies
of hearing the weeping
Until
Until this winter
when I am chosen

Here is food
Here is a safe space
My garden
For you I have made this
This for you

Video and poem by Su Zi

Bio and Links

Peter J Donnelly

lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary.  He has a degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter.  His poetry has been published in various magazines and anthologies including Dreich, High Window,  Southlight,  Black Nore Review,  Obsessed with Pipework,  One Hand Clapping and Ink,  Sweat and Tears.  He won second prize in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition in 2021 and was a joint runner up in the Buzzwords open poetry competition in 2020.