Today’s poem is a prayer. It has been a difficult week: not a disaster, but still one to test the limits of my faith. I have tried to express something of the emotions of the week in this poem, one of the more rigid poetic structures, the ballade. A ballade has a structure of three eight-line stanzas, all ending with the same line and repeating the same ABABBCBC rhyming scheme, then finishing with a four line envoi. Something about the repetition and closing envoi of the ballade make it feel a little like a prayer. So today’s ballade is just that.

Ballade

Some days the silence of your hands
Causes all my hopes to churn –
All my unspoken, cherished plans,
The futile things for which I yearn –
And in each winding, spiral turn,
My doubts deny signs of relief;
They laugh at hope and patience spurn.
Help my mocking unbelief.

Some days the silence of your plans –
The end-point of this long sojourn,
The reasons for all “buts” and “ands” –
Enrages me, when all I’ve learned
Gives me no wisdom to discern
The light from fog, the hope from grief.
As anguish and mute anger burn,
Help my shouting unbelief.

And some todays, although I scan
Your works for something to affirm
The nagging hope that all might pan
Out for good, despite wrong turns,
I still long to dictate my terms
And rot my faith from underneath.
When cold despair is all I’ve earned,
Help my numbing unbelief.

And when your grace bids me return,
Before your throne to beg reprieve,
My hip-bone broken, pride upturned,
Help my frail unbelief.

I presented some students today with the first half of a rhyming couplet for them to finish. The reuiqrement was that their line had rhyme with my line and had to be written in iambic pentameter. Here is my original line with a student’s response:

Behold, upon the sky I saw a star,
A star, a star, a star, a star, a star.

You’ve got to hand it to her. It was in faultless iambic pentameter…

It starts off with these superficial scales:
They come off easily; I watch them fall
Into the water, washed in streams away.

But soon, although my nails scratch away
And wish by force of will to make this fall –
The outward garb of inner greed; these scales,

Practised and rehearsed for years – all fall…
My fingers by themselves can’t tear away
The dragon’s truth carved deep beneath these scales;

Only your hands can make my scales fall away.

Quiet as the moon your fingers whisper
With the cries of men who dream the sky;
The smiles of your fingers glister
With the father’s eloquent reply.
While the evening’s solemn stillness floats high,
Flute as soft as windbreath, new as morning,
Dances over desert sands and faint, dry,
Tempted souls, the nighttime of their mourning
Bringing rest to forty days’ enduring.
Quiet as the moonlight in its vigil,
Hope gathers with its wings, the dawn now yawning.
Light inside the wilderness, though yet still,
Whispers over bass notes and weak fingers;
All the while, the moon’s calm vigil lingers…

Today is Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day, so I have written a poem in honour of what the day represents. We all know that the war to end all wars did not succeed; but in Jesus Christ there is a prospect of true peace one day soon.

This poem is also my experiment with anapestic meter: the reverse of dactylic, two unstressed beats followed by a stress. The word “anapest” means “strike back”, but today we remember the end of all striking, so I decided to play with that tension in this poem.

The End of Striking (Anapestic Foot)

In the fields spread the poppies, blood red as the war,
But the violence of trenches is heard of no more.
Hear the trumpets now calling the troops to the fields
Where the striking of cannons fades out now and yields.
Hear the armistice, sounding the war to end wars,
Has now struck up its last post, made even the scores.
See the prince of peace walking across the red fields.
He has laid down his armour; we have put down our shields.
Only this can end all wars or sound armistice:
That the perfect one, struck down, has risen with peace.

One thing that happens when working in a fixed meter is that the poem’s rhythm can start to sound forced. It can also give the poem a momentum which is hard to break; it makes short and elegant poems feel abrupt, simply because bringing the momentum to a close quickly is a challenging thing. One way of breaking with this is to vary the number of feet in each line; having shorter even numbered lines can help soften the impact of the rhythm and can give each pair of lines a nice resonance to them. It can also be good, when using something like a dactylic foot, with its three beats, to use incomplete feet at the start or finish of the line. The poem retains the neatness and flow that the rhythm gives it, while making it feel less forced. Here is one experiment with doing this:

My lord is the prince of all heavenly things, lifting
All that is lowly and broken and frail.
His hand gathers in and upraises my falling, my
Drooping, decaying and heavenless land.

His love is a song which springs forth with its feathers; it
Breaks through the clouds and the webs of my days.
His grace is a garment of many rich colours, a
Fabric of hope woven out of my shame.

The third of the four main poetic feet, the dactylic foot, is perhaps the most fun to play with, though also very challenging. Its name comes from “dactyl” for “finger” and it relates to the three sections of the finger: one long, two short, meaning one stressed beat followed by two unstressed beats. It gives poetry a light, bouncing rhythm which I have had a bit of fun working with in this poem.

Bounding (Dactylic Foot)

Into the treetops I fly in my singing, all
Green and fresh bounding, the heights of my laughter. The

Sun in its climbing brings life to the rafters; I
Dance over rooftops of houses and canopies.

Listen: my birthday is come; I am newly born.
Death has been flung to its deep forest grave.