Changing Time
by cricketjeff on July 9, 2010. © Jeff Green, All rights reserved
When time was young and kept a steady beat
I knew my life was happy and complete;
But then you dawned, far brighter than the sun
And even time was melted by your heat.
The sober hours soon learned that they could run
And join the silly seconds in their fun,
My shadows filled with your unending rays,
The days of summer sunshine had begun.
So now I find the seasons out of phase
I feel your heat on winter’s darkest days
And every time you speak it sounds to me
Like the greatest lines in Shakespeare’s plays
Each moment we’re apart’s eternity
I wait to hear the voice that sets me free
And wonder if you’ll ever give a sign
That you’re aware of all you do to me
I’ve felt your music trickle down my spine
Its melody and rhythm are divine
You bring me hope and ever tapping feet
But I can’t dance until I know you’re mine
Author notes
Interlocking rubaiyat, that is quatrains in iambic pentameter rhymed aaba bbcb
ccdc and so on until ending with zzaz to link the final quatrain to the first.
Rubai, the individual quatrains, rubaiyat is the plural, are traditional in
Persian poetry and the most famous example of their use is “The Ruba’iyat of
Omar Khayyam” (There aren’t many times you get to write a double y). In most
such Persian poems each rubai can be considered a poem on it own, and they can
be read in any order, although there are some strange rules about alphabetical
order of rhyming words. This poem is in the much more recent Occidental variant
where each stanza is linked to the last and the poem therefore has a continuity
in keeping with how we expect poetry to be.
Enough of the boring guff, more to the point I am not sure I like this poem at
all, I started out to try to write with a consistent metaphor of time altered
by the intensity of love but I seem to have lost the plot. Ah well, if I still
dislike it in the morning I’ll probably delete it or something.
English