Saturday, 20 September 2014

Take a line

Take a line as it coaxes you
into an argument of structured time.
Watch the line and follow
its careful patterns of rhyme and half-ryhme.
Observe its precarious virtuosity.
You can harness it like Aristotle
there is a pleasing symmetry
In Shakespeare’s trick – thesis, antithesis –
but Petrarch’s dance of sextet and quatrain
is the holy marriage of thee and four –
the poetry of two times seven.
Watch the line plunge and come back again
as it turns to magic a prime number
winding precipitously to heaven.

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