PAD Day 20: Getting a Bit Weird and Riddly

 Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "rest" poem, and (2) "write a poem informed by musical phrasing or melody, that employs some form of soundplay (rhyme, meter, assonance, alliteration). One way to approach this is to think of a song you know and then basically write new lyrics that fit the original song’s rhythm/phrasing."

My working of the first prompt is a bit tenuous but is part of the first of these three short poems.  I tried to replicate the formal structure of the Theodore Roethke poem, "In Evening Air," that Maureen of NaPoWriMo used as an example. It's in four sections, each woth six lines, at least partly iambic, with a rhyme scheme of ABCCAB. The second and last lines (the B-rhymes) are longer, about ten syllables, while the other lines are shorter - from four to six.

The poem is written in a sort of surreal or dreamlike language, or as Maureen describes it, "prophetic" and "hypnotic." I tried to echo some of that feeling here. I didn't take her suggestion to try writing alternate lyrics to a song, but the ending of my third section was inspired by the song in my epigraph. The result is a bit weird, but intriguing, I think.

Three Riddles with No Answer
 
I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees….
                                The National, “Bloodbuzz, Ohio”
1.
I sing the birds to rest
and measure them perched on a strung wire,
as morning releases
foreboding increases
that put me to the test.
I sleep, my head full of pink morning fire.
 
2.
My mother is the night.
She suckled me on comets, moon and stars.
In eclipse she dances,
No more second chances—
I am her acolyte.
I slice the dark with ancient scimitars.
 
3.
Oh woe, my lover dies,
Swept away by this flood, this maelstrom,
her flowers washed ashore.
I was her troubadour
until the dragonflies
sewed her eyes, and bees carried her home.