In January, I will explore the style of the Villanelle. This form of poetry has a lot of rules. I am normally a rule-breaker, so I take up the challenge of pirouetting across this restrictive dance floor with a degree of trepidation. Villanelle # 8 I will call The Pain.
My first love is poetry. I played with rhythms as a child as a favorite toy, writing line after line and verse upon verse down in a notebook my mama gave me. The words became undecipherable squiggly lines dancing across the page. I remember sitting on my Uncle Harvey’s porch, making up poems only I could read. I learned to write real letters after I started school. That’s when my adventure with poetry started. I found myself in a dance with a fickle dancer. As soon as I got the steps right, the beat changed, and the singer sang a different tune. COVID-19 and retirement have given me the gift of time to explore, study, and capture the essence of poetry, making all its different moved on the page.
The rules I followed writing Villanelle # 8
The rules for creating a Villanelle are simple and straight forward. This style of poetry must have 19 lines and five stanzas. The closing stanza has four lines. Also, line 1 gets repeated in lines 6, 12, and 18. Thus, line 3 gets repeated in lines 9, 15, and 19. There are so many rules and so little time.
The Pain
There is an ache that eclipses all other pain
Throbbing long into the black night
The abysmal agony wicked and inhumane
Pounding and pulsing without restrain
I lay awake and wait for daylight
There is an ache that eclipses all other pain
Tortured by the hand of a manic demon profane
Burn and prickle with no end in sight
The abysmal agony wicked and inhumane
Old ages relentless unending campaign
To make us yield and become finite
There is an ache that eclipses all other pain
Stumbling across the ravaged tangled terrain
It takes a lot of effort to put up a good fight
The abysmal agony wicked and inhumane
No matter how much we rage and complain
We all must submit to our mortal plight
There is an ache that eclipses all other pain
The abysmal agony wicked and inhumane
Who is Molly Shea?
Molly Shea is an accomplished fictional short story writer from Indiana who writes short stories and novels about a fictional town called Tecumseh. To read more of her short stories and adventures, click here.
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