Sunday, April 10, 2016

Woe.

I sing a sweet barcarole to escape grief—
its sores bleeding confusion, silence, disbelief.
Yes, we try chanting; airs afford us relief.

Thus men row; miseries ebb as harmony haltingly flows.

Melodizing is soothing. Mourners need a caretaker, however,
a spirit caressing and embracing humanity’s woe.
Because grief (a sullenness which protects, as heartland’s scarecrow
intends) when lingering, cuts—cuts, song's powerless to sew.

Discordant traumas painting a grisly show!

Melancholy dreams of reaching higher.
By contacting divinity, heartache generates
harmonic elixir of serenity. O God, vast Universe,
do allay the tide, so I, a crooner,
blissfully return amongst shipmates.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

As an additional personal challenge to writing about the emotion of grief, my poem also corresponds with digits of mathematical constant, π/Pi.  First, the number of lines in each stanza is equal to its first few digits: 3.1415.  Secondly, and this was the most time-consuming, the number of letters per word, also correspond to the first 100 digits of π.  For instance “Woe” has three letters, “I” has one, and “sing” has four, corresponding to the first three digits, and so on.  Oh, and to represent “0”, I’ve used the letter “O” and words with 10 letters.  And here are the corresponding 100 digits:

14159265
358979
32384626

433832795

02884197
1693993
751058209
749445923

078164

06286
20899
86280348
25342117
0679

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