Beauty
Finally, here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). Donald Justice’s poem, “There is a gold light in certain old paintings,” plays with both art and music, and uses an interesting and (as far as I know) self-invented form. His six-line stanzas use lines of twelve syllables, and while they don’t use rhyme, they repeat end words. Specifically, the second and fourth line of each stanza repeat an end-word or syllable; he fifth and sixth lines also repeat their end-word or syllable. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that uses Justice’s invented form.
Slow day at the office. Recent good weather subsides.
An expecting mother discusses Botox.
Some lines are good, she says. Like those indicating
laughter. But others, now that you mention Botox,
I can see why some might want to fix the frowning
A colleague overhears, misses context, frowning
A planefull of young men, travelling to Turkey
A bemused air steward, a beauty eternal
Or so he believes, leans over the bald patch
To refill a drink of man who, on return
Will have a head of hair, enough to match the cash
In his pocket. His life savings, withdrawn as cash
On a marble workbench, not so far from the Tate
A man hunched, with a scalpel, hunched like a shearer
Goes to work on the three hundred year old painting
Restoring beauty, fancies himself a shearer
While expecting mother sips her coffee and smiles
Wishes for a laughing child, with lines, beauty smiles
