Monday, February 13, 2012
Cana
To the wedding, Christ, the human, the divine,
Came with his friends, who drank a lot of wine.
The guests at the feast succeeded in draining
Each jar, each clay-cold tank, quite dry. The wine
Disappeared, imbibed by thirsty carousers
Who you would think had never tasted wine!
Mary of Nazareth, mother of Christ, was there,
Spoke to her son frank words: "They have no wine."
"Woman, what's this to me and thee? My hour
Has not yet come." Those gallons of wine,
Would she have him replace them? If so, how?
Costly to purchase, and hard to make, grape wine.
"Do whatever he tells you," Mary said
To the certainly-bewildered stewards of wine.
The lowly, lordly Christ summoned those servants
Who had been helping to dispense the wine.
"Bring me the jars of water." And they did.
But water, though refreshing, is not wine.
Was it a touch, a blessing, or a breath
That changed what came from a well into fine wine?
Sister water, the modest maiden, blushed:
And soon the water-jars were filled with wine.
The guests of the happy couple marvelled, danced
With newfound joy. Where did he find this wine?
They thanked their God, they thanked his unknown Christ.
"At this late hour, we have the choicest wine."
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4 comments:
Riposte, and touche!
Bob -- I tried for some internal rhymes with words ending in -nk: drank, tank, think, frank, thank. But I couldn't sustain this pattern consistently, as the phonemes are not rich in rhymes. An "orthodox" ghazal is supposed to have a rhyme-word immediately prior to the refrain-word.
If I were to write a brand-new ghazal tonight,
I should place a rhyme-word in plain sight.
If I were to write in calligraphic script,
I'd hope my penmanship would not strain sight.
I'd hope to write some illuminating verse
That would cause the blindest reader to gain sight.
I would not be too terribly obscure,
For in darkness, the eye must struggle to feign sight.
I'd hope that the poem would give a little pleasure
And not be viewed with squinting-in-pain sight!
Aim, O dylan, for happy lucidity,
For fluent sound, clear meaning, and sane sight.
You're right about the preceding rhyme-word; I didn't do it because I hadn't read the Wikipedia article carefully enough to notice that particular requirement (also, while I kept to a consistent meter for the second lines of the couplets, I was very loose in the first lines).
It does make things more challenging; you've certainly handled it well in your example here.
Then (I suppose) one can have fun with the rhyme-word. Rather than monomaniacally sticking to one rhyme throughout, one could sustain a rhyme for two or three couplets, and then change it.
So:
--plain sight
--strain sight
--my sight
--eye sight
--blind sight
--hindsight
--dim sight
--prim sight
--far sight
--bizarre sight
Something like that.
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