Wolf

I’m doing the tricky thing, which is making me flex my old poet muscles. I’m 100k words into this novel and I can fly by on the keyboard when I’m writing prose, but then I hit a brick wall of needing to write a poem, where a single stanza can take me an hour or even all afternoon.

It’s harder still because I’m writing poems that are meant to be perennial to this culture, the kind that are old and never fade, which means focusing on rhythm and melody, making them easy to remember and stick in your head. On top of that, I’m using them to layer and expand the world, hiding secrets to the narrative in these bits of song and poetry.

And so, for sake of transparency, which I suppose this writing diary is, I’m sharing the current draft of three poems.

Part of the trick is to not give them the whole poem, but instead to give the readers a taste of something that feels longer. You create the fragment to represent the whole, and you do this for a number of reasons.

The first is that it saves you time as a writer.

The second, and more important, is that your reader probably doesn’t want a 50 line poem in the novel.

Some might! And maybe you, as the writer, feel you need to write the entire epic before you can sliver some out to put in the novel, but those are all up to you.

Anyway, here’s the first, which is a lullaby.

Where the wolf wind finds the sea
Flows the river of memory
Sleep, my love, safe and free
For the river sings through me

Where go the moons
When they leave our sky?
Where go the moons
When the dreams all die?

In her waters, wyrd and blue
Lie the words I wept for you
Slide down, my dear, into her sound
Not too deep or you’ll be drowned.

This next one is meant to be a child verse, the kind of rhyming stomping song that children sing while they play.

Cut out me tongue
While I’m yet young
My songs unsung
That I may never name them

All ash and smoke
his lies will choke
all ye free folk
That I may never touch him

And then there’s a break in the poem here for some narration, but we return to this stanza later.

Yet we free folk
Must swear by oak
An oath to choke
On they who come to seize us

And finally the single stanza I spent 90 minutes on. You may read it and think to yourself, All that work for that? To which I will only say, you try writing in this stupid meter!

“Let down your hair and meet us there,”
in sweetness fair he spoke his prayer
and I enthralled walked errandless
past high cypress to Briartress

The funny thing about this meter is that it causes you to simply run through the stanza. But that’s a good thing. I want this to feel ancient but also playful, an earworm that’s also fun to say. Like, say it aloud! Say it as fast as you can.

It’s a meter Tolkien invented and that I like using quite a bit, but it is a difficult meter to write, though it makes for a delight to hear.

Anyway, this is where the novel’s at right now.