I had the idea for this poem playing over in my head this evening on the way home from the working week. If you’ve followed my poetry much over the past year or so you might have noticed that often what I write can be quite dark or melancholy. Today’s poem expresses perhaps my desire to express myself in other ways, and the joy that comes from finding a more positive tune to sing.

Hope in C Major

I have long rehearsed these minor keys;
I know every diminished chord.
Atonal clusters sound in me;
I linger on sharps and flats.

But sometimes my fingers stumble on
A chord that rings bright and true,
And all my minor chords resolve
With notes that sing like home,

My hand stretched out across the keys,
Surprised to find beneath
My fingers’ disarray three notes
That hold together me,

Rearranged yet still my ears
Know what chord they now hear:
A sound of resolution and
A space for songs to rest.

This week was my students’ first week back at school and, unsurprisingly, it has been a tiring week. Typically my mind slips back into old patterns of defeated thinking when I am this tired. But tonight I found comfort in my favourite type of poem to write – the Spenserian sonnet. I hope it can speak on behalf of other exhausted people everywhere at the end of another working week.

Spenserian Sonnet No. 4: Exhaustion

The week slowly digging its stubborn heels
Into the soil of all our Fridays
And wet dirt clinging to the spinning wheels
Of bright tomorrow’s plans and eager ways,

All things slow down as memory replays
How yesterday our eagerness turned cold
(And last year too was full of yesterdays
Which ended with those endings that we’ve told).

It does not pay, they say, to be too bold
Or spark yourself alight with fiery zeal.
Yet some there are who smile, being old,
And hold still tight to what our failures steal:

The knowledge that tomorrow, sure as sun,
Brings stories fresh and yet to be begun.

This is a poem I wrote today, in a new form that I’m experimenting with. As far as I’m aware, it’s a new form – perhaps someone else has stumbled on it too, but so far I haven’t come across any other examples of it. The pattern is simple enough – a cycle of rhymes with alternating stanzas mirroring the rhyming pattern of the stanza before, and then closing with a couplet that takes the first and last rhyme of the opening stanza. I’ve called the form a “quatrina”, because it’s a little like the tritina or the sestina in terms of the cycling rhymes, though there are some obvious differences. I hope that you like reading it.

Quatrina: New Land

We haven’t learnt this path before;
It challenges with every step,
With all its new ways and its hopes
That sound like tongues to our old ears.

We haven’t learnt to bypass tears
Nor learnt to be calm on these slopes.
We must give up these fears we’ve kept
If we hope to hope for more.

Our neurons know the ancient score,
The pathways they have learnt and leapt,
And though the spirit vainly gropes,
It knows the well-worn tale of years.

But there is time to rewrite fears
And teach our stories other tropes.
There is truth in dreams we’ve wept
And longings trapped in silent stores,

For there’s new land on other shores
And promises more pure than tears.