Category Archives: Writing

Sonnets

TNH birthday sonnet

We stand between the darkness and the light:
The balance-point, when coming day reveals
Details that the darker time conceals,
And watch the sunlight overtake the night.
This equinox marks more than balance struck
Between the darkness, velvet cloak swept back,
And gold-robed daytime, mirroring the black.
This is the coming of the light. What luck
This luminiferous date also brought
Our hostess forth, whose writing more than glows:
Her fractal grasp of language yields prose
That’s filigreed with sunlight, finely wrought.
So happy birthday. May your day be bright.
From me, and all of us on Making Light.

Written in honor of Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s birthday, and originally posted on Making Light.

Doggerel & Pastiches

The Lady of Khazad-dûm

7 Comments

Someone on a website I frequent mentioned that she often gets the urge to cross The Lady of Shallot with the story of Gandalf battling the Balrog in the Mines of Moria.

I confess, I had never found myself prone to that urge. Until she mentioned it, at which point it ate my brain.

The result:

Beneath the mountains, white with snow,
The orcs about their business go
Their orders to maintain below,
In the depths of Khazad-dûm,
A sleeping evil, left to lie
Until required by the Eye.
They care for it and ask not why
They toil in the gloom.

But one who labours in its lair
Has found the Balrog in his care
To be – to orcish senses – fair.
Fires burn in Khazad-dûm
And warm the darkness of the deeps
While he his tender vigil keeps.
His charge, protected, deeply sleeps
Inside its rocky tomb.

The other orcs, freed from its side,
Have different tasks, their might applied
To warlike training, side on side.
Underneath deep Khazad-dûm
The caverns echo with their song
While artificers labour long
To forge them armour, thick and strong,
For when the wars resume.

The flames beneath Caradhras burn
While up above, the seasons turn
Until, in time, the dwarves return.
Plundering rich Khazad-dûm.
At first they linger at the top
Above the yawning chasm’s drop
But then they dig, and do not stop
And thereby seal their doom.

They fill their halls with men and elves
And carve great rooms to please themselves
While underneath, a miner delves
Far too deep in Khazad-dûm.
The orc at practice stops his blow
As pickaxe noises grow and grow.
And then to muster-points they go
Lest dwarves their charge exhume.

The beaters start to pound their drums
So from the deeps the great sound comes
And in each chest, the breastbone thrums
Roaring out, “O Khazad-dûm!”
They rush into the glaring light
And, overwhelming with their might
The feasting dwarves, restore the night,
And then their work resume.

The battle in the past belongs:
Another chapter in their songs
Of dwarven deaths and ancient wrongs.
Deep in shadowed Khazad-dûm
The Balrog shifts its mighty frame
At dreams of swords, and fear, and flame.
Its keeper strokes it, rasps its name,
And turns to leave its room.

But then, a sound. A single stone
Comes clattering from where it’s thrown
Into a well, and this alone
Rouses all of Khazad-dûm.
And as the drummers beat and pound
The battle-rhythm shakes the ground.
The orcs come swarming all around
To Balin’s stony tomb.

Then, in its room, the sleeper wakes
And with one blow, its prison breaks.
So from the depths, its coming shakes
All the stones of Khazad-dûm.
It sees the fleeing figures hide
And casts its shadows far and wide
Like wings unfurled from either side
To smother them in gloom.

And then he comes, as from its dreams:
A bearded figure whose sword gleams
With silver light. Its lancing beams
Bringing day to Khazad-dûm.
The Balrog roars with blinded eyes.
The grey-robed form its way denies:
“You shall not pass,” the wizard cries.
And still the drumbeats boom.

They struggle then, the swordsman small
Against his foe, but brave withal.
He strikes the Balrog, and they fall
Into deepest Khazad-dûm.
The fighters plunging, dark and bright,
Leave eight companions, put to flight,
To scramble upward, to the light
And, grieved, their quest resume.

Behind them, howling hordes surround
The broken bridge, while all around
From depths to heights the battles sound
Echoing through Khazad-dûm.
They clash their blades and stamp their feet
And roar defiance and defeat
At enemies they cannot meet,
Then silence fills the gloom.

But one orc gives a keening call:
He somehow sees the Balrog’s fall.
And terror comes upon them all
Standing massed in Khazad-dûm.
The wizard is of no concern,
But should the Dark Lord come to learn
Their charge is dead, then they will burn.
The Eye will be their doom.

And so the orcs depart the mines.
At night, when only moonlight shines
They march away in scattered lines
Fleeing from black Khazad-dûm.
While in the lonely, lightless deeps
The Balrog-keeper howls and weeps
Then in the depthless chasm leaps
In empty Khazad-dûm.

For my next trick, I will harness the twin engines of Tolkien and Tennyson spinning in their graves and provide unlimited power for the world.

Bookbinding, Sonnets

Containing Knowledge II

All knowledge is contained, but not in words.
The sparrows cannot tell the mice below
The art and joy of flight. The things they know
Just fit inside the hollow bones of birds.
And so it is with books, although I try
To case in words the things that only hands
Can truly hold. The body understands:
I love to bind as sparrows love to fly.
The feel of book blocks in the nipping press,
The fragrances leather, glue and glaire,
The paring of a hide, the ways that papers tear –
The body knows things language can’t express.
My books contain so many things I know –
Some things they say, and some they simply show.

Originally posted on Making Light, part of a meditation on books and knowledge (starting at comment 135).

Bookbinding, Sonnets

Containing Knowledge I

All knowledge is contained. Each box enclosed
By bone, or paper, or HTML
Constrains the facts inside it all too well,
And separates things better juxtaposed.
For knowledge is inert until it’s mixed,
Until the facts spill out, and we compare
Our unrelated notions, stop and stare,
Assumptions overturned, at truth unfixed.
The way papyrus rolled and vellum curled,
The spread of trade as social classes changed:
These unrelated facts, when well arranged,
Can show us not just books, but all the world.
And thus the knowledge that appeals to me
Is uncontained, and unconstrained, and free.

Originally posted on Making Light, part of a meditation on books and knowledge (starting at comment 135).

Family, Sonnets

How to Make Your Husband Cry

6 Comments

A week or two ago, one of the commenters on a weblog I frequent quoted a line from one of her dreams: “Sometimes the petal is as effective as the flower.”

And I felt the tug I feel sometimes, when there’s a sonnet somewhere inside me, waiting to come out. It took about half an hour from tug to completion, but when I read it to M, he thought it was so sweet he cried.

So, for Valentine’s day, a love sonnet.

He knows me well, and so his slightest glance
Conveys a sonnet’s worth of loving thought.
He speaks my mind so often it’s not chance
And I say what he’s thinking, like as not.
I brush his shoulder as I pass his chair,
Or as he drives, reach out and tap his knee.
He leans his head back as I stroke his hair
Then turns back to his work, away from me.
We could say more, but other things intrude,
And evenings are too short to get things done.
Our common terseness might be seen as rude
But one word’s wealth, when there is need for none.
A word, a touch, our deepest feeling shows:
The petal is effective as the rose.

 

Writing

Beware the inexperienced expert

The road beside the river tends to flood
When autumn storms bring rainfall to the hills.
Your wagons and your horses, mired in mud
Are trapped until the water rises, and it kills.
The mountain passes close with winter snows,
The desert’s parched in summer’s white-hot days.
The road that looks the safest often goes
To nothing but a hovel, thick with strays.
A canny guide is worth her weight in gold
When maps are not enough, and no one knows
When caution suits and when you must be bold,
And when to give up on the route you chose.
You wouldn’t trust a guide who’d never been
Along the road, and learned from what she’s seen.

Originally posted on Making Light.

Sonnets

The inevitable fate of a knitting blog

The threads on Making Light are known to drift —
In that, it’s just like any other place.
But they do more. They tangle, twist and lift,
Then knot and unknot, twine and interlace.
We spin threads out to unexpected length
And tug them sideways till they interact.
The intersections give the site its strength:
It stretches when it’s stressed, but stays intact.
And if our needled comments don’t create
Harmonious intarsial designs,
Our crotchets still keep threads from running straight,
Since we prefer to write with crooked lines.
When topics tangle, we rejoice. We’d whinge
If threads hung straight, since all we’d have is fringe.

Originally posted, astonishingly enough, on Making Light.

Pantoums

Caffeinated IV

Your coffee can open your eyes.
The finest Arabica bean,
Is grown where the morning sun lies
On mountainsides covered in green.

The finest Arabica bean,
The delicate Indian leaf,
On mountainsides covered in green
Is grown amid hunger and grief.

The delicate Indian leaf
To go in your afternoon tea
Is grown among hunger and grief
Of people whom you never see.

To go in your afternoon tea:
That dollop of pain in your drink
Of people whom you never see.
Before you enjoy, stop to think.

That dollop of pain in your drink
Is grown where the morning sun lies.
Before you enjoy, stop to think.
Your coffee can open your eyes.

Part of a post to a caffeine poetry slam on Making Light (starting at about comment 79).