Remember when I accidentally made a new poetry form (The Abracadabra)? Well, I’ve made a variation on that inverted triangle, adding more words underneath to form a triangular base and now I’ve got something that looks like either an hourglass or a diabolo, or maybe a somewhat difficult to hold goblet (or, it turns out, like an inverse Ninette with more lines). And so, deciding we need more poetry forms named for something that isn’t a Romance language for once, I’ve called this an “Awrwydr” (which is the Welsh for hourglass, because I’m not that original, after all…).
So the pattern goes:
Line 1: 11 syllables
Line 2: 10 syllables
Line 3: 9 syllables
Line 4: 8 syllables
Line 5: 7 syllables
Line 6: 6 syllables
Line 7: 5 syllables
Line 8: 4 syllables
Line 9: 3 syllables
Line 10: 2 syllables
Line 11: 1 syllables
Line 12: 2 syllables
Line 13: 3 syllables
Line 14: 4 syllables
Line 15: 5 syllables
Line 16: 6 syllables
Line 17: 7 syllables
Line 18: 8 syllables
Line 19: 9 syllables
Line 20: 10 syllables
Line 21: 11 syllables
For example:
Crossing
you pay attention, and even then I’m
reliably… unreliable.
What is the good of being here
unless you can see where else
you could otherwise be?
Time to make a choice,
and that’s the rub;
the price of
being
free?
being
decisive.
Otherwise you’re
bound to hover in
the borderland between
states of being, doomed to the
thing that binds you from walking off.
You cannot triumph, locked in place and
saying: Woe is me, if only I’d done,
seen, been more! Here is where fate waits, patiently.
So this is another combination of concrete poetry and syllable-counting poetry, and you can find the means to use a training wheels support mechanism via my handy-dandy Concrete and Repeating (and counting) Forms spreadsheet.
Have a go and let me know how you got on!
