One late fall night

Type of Poem: Rubaiyat
Prompt: "Where will you go?"

A rubaiyat is a collection of rhyming quatrains. I can find no definitive requirement for syllabic length or meter, but judging by the most famous examples, I highly recommend choosing a meter and a syllable restriction and sticking to it. The rhyming scheme is AABA where each following stanza uses the unrhymed line of previous as its rhyming line. So in a three quatrain rubaiyat, that would be AABA BBCB CCDC.

So when I read up on this form I was initially excited because it was so normal compared to many of the forms so far. I figured I could try and push myself and write something a little more experimental or deep than my usual narratives. Well...yeah, no, that didn't work. I scrapped a dozen different starts before I admitted defeat.

Whenever I do feel writer's block coming on, I have a tried and true way to stave it off. See, I don't always sit down and write a whole poem in a go. A lot of times a line comes into my head, or a feeling, and I try and quickly jot it down before I forget. Sometimes I upload these "thought dumps", and sometimes I don't, but I always keep them. That way I always have at least a jumping off point when it's time to write. This time, that poem was I tasted sweet spring and the result is before you.

Can you tell that Halloween is one of my favorite holidays? I kind of see this as a cross behind Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven.

Companion piece to Dreams are a Gateway.

edit: replaced the line "and as the roots engulfed my limbs"


This is my twentieth submission for the December Form Challenge from #ProjectDFC. You can read the rest of my entries here.