Memento Mori

Shelved

humanist55

I sit beside
a bookcase
laden with my life

The Charm of Birds
is the only gift from
my grandfather

I early read my
father’s G.B.S. complete
plays and prefaces

The camel teapot
contains half
my sister’s ashes

The group of geese is
my memento mori
to my mother

Books of hobbies
work and music
fill my shelves and brain…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, merrildsmith in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft challenges us to write to the Triversen form.

*Three-line stanzas (Tercets). Each tercet is a sentence.
The tercets are grammatical, and they are broken by breaths,
the accents and rhythms of normal speech—two to four beats per line.
*Unrhymed
The ideal length is 18 lines or 6 stanzas, but even Williams did not always follow that rule.
Ideally, each line is two to four beats, or stressed syllable (not total syllables). Williams disliked iambic pentameter, but others have written Triversen poems with more beats.
Here are some additional points that are often mentioned.
*Alliteration—it contributes to the stress syllables
*Imagist

As Ain commented on my last poem, I seem to be going through a phase of poetry memoir…

Memento Mori

humanist55

When my mother died
I did not succumb to grief
rather the opposite, it was relief

I wanted to be overwhelmed
to demonstrate a filial flow of tears
dry eyes triumphed over social fears

The truth is her life was set in aspic
the repertoire of stories repeatedly told
the only objects I would have valued, long ago sold

So if I imagine that feeling as a place
it is a saccharine sitting room
as stuck and unchanging as a tomb

I carried bits of it away to remind me
a group of disparate ducks now grace my bookshelf
tiny, sculptural memento mori – notes to self

that she was gone and feeling ended
long before the final breath was drawn
and being now the eldest, I entered a new dawn…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Punam invites us to write about Grief – paeansunplugged in Poetics. My poem is about grief long dissolved before the loss itself and I hope I will not be judged harshly for it…