Welcome to Poetic Forms: A Series.
Today we are meeting the Terza Rima, which is an Italian stanzaic form, used most notably by Dante Alighieri in Commedia (The Divine Comedy). It consists of tercets with interwoven rhymes (aba, bcb, cdc, etc). A concluding couplet or single line in some variations, rhymes with the penultimate line of the last tercet. There are other variations on the form, the most notable perhaps being the Terza Rima Sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’.
I have taken an older poem of mine that was written in Free Verse originally and reworked it as a Terza Rima. It is a personal exploration of what I might call a ‘hard beginning,’ the making of a core wound and, in the end, of me.
Each line of the tercet ( 3 line stanza) makes use of iambic pentameter, a poetic meter consisting of five iambs per line, where each iamb is a pair of unstressed and stressed syllables. Each line totals ten syllables, mimicking natural English speech and heartbeats. (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM).
It was a challenge but I think that the essence of the original has been sharpened by the process. It might take a couple of reads of the line for you to find the meter here, and I have added a few dashes here and there to help with that. If you cannot locate it, the poem will still read like a free verse piece.
p(raise)
(mine)ing for soul
i did not understand that lonely strife
which framed itself persistent visitor
to bid me come shad-owed into this life
absence of light grew fearful as my core
hollo-wed a space for presence all alone
a seed was planted, sovereignty to gnaw
beginning was the word, as ancient bone
the angels of this harr-owed space were t(w)o
born wrathful, envious and carved in stone
wing-ed and wounded, pain was all they knew
trans-generations, mouthing fire and ice
cold venom’s spittle, spattering the view
my psyche stained, my core rewired for nice
submissive inking, shaming me all-ways
a womb to stain me, liberty the price
fight them, imbibe their ghastly soulless-gaze
to build reflective mask of sheer terror
ghost angels wre-stl-ing your gone now days
i disappear myself, em-pty mirror
and paint me outwardly as a someone
morphing a coat, cracked-broken to shimmer
appeasement for this tortured path of one
survival now, the only goal afoot
my coat a metaphor for nothing shone
no glimmering, a ghost inside my gut
i lived only to flesh their grim glories
and dazzle them enough to make the cut
bringing my own cage into their story
hatching a long road to nowhere at all
so carefully reflecting their foray
i stepped so gently as to heed this call
don’t break the flimsy eggs(hell) masquerade
one echo of a crack into the fall
the black hole of my life, it always stayed
old damocles, a whispered blade away
a haunting by my own ghost now i weighed
called back i am to that crib-orphaned day
a longing for some place that cannot be
i wring that hard grief every single way
to coil a hanging rope about what’s free
the time flew on, the coat became a skin
i wear it inside out, it is not me
this glittered beauty danced, a crooked djinn
that mannequin of soul in full wide-screen
i search but there’s no way to let me in
who lies below, a hidden silent scream
all curled up lost, so wretched and astray
obliterating all, that might be seen
filled with a silent sobbing now i say
aren’t all seeds planted in a darkened void?
and here’s a thing my sense of self now prays
that burdens of my days might now be buoyed
a sedimented birthing seam of gold
an essence made from timeless waves of joy
as life itself came tumbling into old
and glimmer in a light such wings of fall
and there’s no price you see, I can’t be sold
tis born from losing everything and all
discovering a thread that can’t be lost
i fashioned presence in this place of thrall
living I see has a brought me gentle frost
the softening of my clay was there enough
and crucible has held me by such loss
the seed it cracked, now i am not so tough
this is my freedom, vulne-ra-bil-i-ty
emergence of my truth and there’s no bluff
a consequence of life I am to be
my voice can now be heard it found the day
dissembled by the earth beneath of me
diminishing the self might be the way
bring ash to raise your dead and keen their sway
Thank you for reading. More from The Poetic Form: A Series below, where I explore the Sestina.