It’s a Dufay morning, a walled garden
filled with scent of mint and sweet douçaine of bees
where lies my lady, melismatic curves
caressed by sunlight polyphonic but not loud,
where I perform the rubrics of my vocation,
stitch two lives together with my lute’s quill.
Outside the walls of morning
the armed man swings Good Counsel’s severed head
and Saracens profane the holy wisdom.
But here, this morning, in this one holy hour,
all is well, and well worth praise to God.
©2012 Jeffrey Quick
Hmm, those first two stanzas have a slightly hallucinogenic atmosphere about them.
Perhaps it will sound better once you set it–lute, virginal, viol, n-part madrigal?
My wife thought I was tripping too. But then, she doesn’t do poetry.
It’s a Charles Ives morning, a mauled cardigan
Pilled,so rent with lint, a dented tin of C-flats,
Hurled by my lady with phlegmatic left hook,
Distressed with barbed wire, Polly Rhythmic cries out loud;
Here with two bricks, I plot my vacation,
I pitch two hives a measure, then run like hell.
Full Stop.
Your parody leaves me….speechless, LOL!
Jeffrey, though I had to research Guillaume Dufay, to fully grasp the meaning of line 1 of your poem, I had no such need to research the last line to completely grasp its meaning, as it echoes Psalm 118:24.
Well, that was an accident!
It might well be too private an image set to be a good poem.