Tag Archives: community

Sonnets

Dragons to the left of me, dragons to the right

Teresa guards a treasure-trove of prose
From trolls who come to ruin and despoil.
Her comrades and her commentaries foil
All but a few; she disemvowels those.
We watch Macdonald’s ghostly tales unfold,
While Patrick burns with periodic fire
(Then phoenix-like, recovers from his ire!)
And Avram delves the web for links like gold.
Then tiger Bruce trades puns with Serge the Muse,
Heresiarch the Centaur, Greg the Ent.
And then come bards whose verses each invent
Another story: wealth that we can’t lose.
The older archetypes their places cede:
You guys are all the dragons that I need.

Originally posted on Making Light.

Sonnets

On beginning

The first days with the flaming sword, I swore
I’d break my arms, or burn my fingertips.
My palms were blistered. Skin came off in strips.
At sunset I’d be weary to the core.
And now I can, with joyful spirit, tell
How when my widespread wings were newly fledged
I lost control, and ended my flight wedged
Inside a cliffside crack (from which I fell!)
In time I learned to better wield my sword
And not set light to quite so many trees.
I fly for days on end with grace and ease.
And doing these things well, I please the LORD.
(But I confess – His pleasure’s just a part
Of my delight in mastering my art.)

Written for Teresa Nielsen Hayden at the beginning of a new job, and posted on Making Light.

Sonnets

The spirit of Xopher inhabits us all

The ti bon ange wakes and sips its tea.
The day awaits, the curled-up sleeping man
Lies ready to inhabit, so it can
In all he does, express divinity.
In cyberspace, the greater angel stirs
And spreads its bit-fledged wings, extending far
Beyond a body’s reach. The shining star
Of Coming Light unfallen, it confers
Upon its willing agents powers thus:
The well-wrought pun, the gentle quip,
The tactful hint, the jest whose pointed tip
Is yet unbarbed. And so it graces us.
O Xopher’s angel twins, the great and small,
Come comment here, enlightening us all!

Written to embarrass my friend Xopher on Making Light.

Who can categorise everything?

Open Thread for Refugees

52 Comments

Welcome, anyone who wants to park here while Patrick and Teresa’s living room is under tarps. The beer is in the bathtub, the chips are really crisps, and I might bake a cake later.

In the meantime,

Otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est
otium exsultas nimiumque gestis
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes

Translate, mangle, scan, discuss, ignore.

Note for my usual readers: the Moveable Type installation on the site where I hang out rather a lot is broken. I’ve invited the community over here until it’s fixed.

Don’t let this stop you from commenting – these are great folks.

Sonnets

Religion is the warp on custom’s loom

Religion is the warp on custom’s loom
(And warped it sometimes is, for we are frail.
We fumble in the dark, and often fail
To see our own faults clearly in the gloom.)
And culture, common practice, makes the weft.
Our actions and our ethics jointly weave
Like tabby, twill, jaquard. What we believe
And what we do cannot be clearly cleft.
It goes against the grain to pick a thread
And say, “This doesn’t represent the whole.”
We live with strands that we cannot control,
And cut our garb to fit our cloth instead.
And so, in peaceful spirit, can we please
Discuss dupattas and salwar kameez?

Originally posted on Making Light.

Sonnets

Moderation sonnetry

We value moderation in all things.
The edges may define the battleground
But on their own, unbalanced and unsound,
They cannot make the peace consensus brings.
And sometimes in the drive to win a fight
Participants forget that victory
Is counted in the people who now see
The world anew, not in who’s proven right.
A careful gardener of good debate
Can prune the branches, leave the essence whole,
Protect the fragile, dsmvwl th trll,
And understanding on all sides create.
Because we need what conversation brings
We value moderation in all things.

Originally posted on Making Light.

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.

Sonnets

Caffeinated I

The two contenders joust with poetry:
A caffeine-fueled SF sonnet slam.
Fragano takes the part of honest tea
And Will is coffee’s advocate. Hot damn!
The verses fly. Will has the grounds to show
His drink produces forceful, urgent verse.
Fragano’s meditative sonnets go
To prove that tea leaves poets none the worse.
Now me, I drink them both, but take up arms
Against the two as well, if they’re not bought
From sources where the people on the farms
That grow them are rewarded as they ought.
So write your verse and drink your drinks, you two,
But just make sure it’s Fairtrade when you brew.

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