The challenge from Tricia this week at The Miss Rumphius Effect was to write a roundel. I didn’t have time to do this, but I also didn’t do last week’s macaronic verse challenge. So Wednesday night, while I was at a ski trip meeting with my daughter, I was sitting there trying to block out the noise of teenage boys sitting behind us while I jotted down rhyming words and potential lines.
In my poetry diary that day, I had thrown this onto paper:
The silence of sleep
is the noisiest world
without sound
tears, cries, laughter, screams
echo in my forest head with
nobody to hear them
I had been thinking about how some of the most vivid sounds in my life happen in my dreams, and meanwhile, I’m lying there, silent. So I wrote this roundel. I started out trying to show a range of all the noises and emotions that happen in dreams, but the space constraints and–mostly–the rhyme scheme restraints ended up with my focusing on scary or terrible things. Anyway, this is what I ended up with.
Dreams conceal sound as darkness bleeds slowly to light
Moon hovers above and noises under eyelids roam ?round
Softly masked footsteps steal through black furtive night
Dreams conceal sound
Somersault avalanche pounds the sky’s thunder to ground
Swallowed regrets make voices too shiny and bright
Wind howls in oak trees, crackling and yellow autumn-gowned
Hopes from your past crash down from immeasurable height
Shrieking red music sniffs at your ears like a hound
Fear claws the dirt of the grave where the fit’s not too tight
Dreams conceal sound
–Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved
Thanks for the challenge, Tricia. It was fun!
And rest assured, my blog-reading friends, that I don’t actually have nightmares or bad dreams very often at all. I just wanted to go for some intense moments in the poem:>)
Tricia says it’s not too late to play, so visit her original post and give this a try!
Karen Edmisten has the poetry roundup today!