Freedom in Form

I was never fond of writing in poetic form but practicing it this semester has given me a change of heart. With each new form I discover, it feels like a piece of me is unlocked; in the confinements of form, I find a new freedom. I am excited to write- it feels like play.

There is a creative challenge that comes from the repetition of villanelles and pantoums, or the hidden rhymes and refrains of the ghazal. The spiraling sestina took me into a world of its own, allowing me to dig my nails into a small section of myself and magnify it through the evolution of end words. I have more forms to work through and many more writing practices ahead of me, but there is a confidence I am finding in how limitless the language of poetry appears.

So many fragmented ideas now have a body to reside in, and I am ready to breathe life into them.

Stanza 1-2 of my sestina draft:

Again 

An abstract incarnation, a god of this life, 

Steps into fresh flesh while the old stays behind rotting 

This avatar rises from the misting earth 

With lanky limbs dangling and damp  

From nature’s womb where the past lays buried 

Though remembered in the tangled roots of trees 

Their future takes form, growing between dense trees 

Allowing a single seed of epigenetic memory to shape all life 

But eventually their world becomes covered in snow, buried 

Beneath the corpses of leaves who suffered autumn’s rotting, 

Awaiting the day it all melts away, fresh and damp 

With spring, and They return home- to Earth