different meters

Humph. After trying a couple of poems using primarily tetrameter, I've decided I don't like it much. Not as much as pentameter and trimeter, at least. Usually, when I use meters of varying lengths, I predominantly use one length, and occasionally substitute a different one. I don't think I'm going to use four-beat lines as the dominant ones anymore, for the most part.

Crossposted on "Eat This Scroll"

[Acts 9:1-9]

Driving to the nursery
with Hope just yesterday,
suddenly I couldn't see:
At first my eyes began to tear
and then began to burn,
until I could barely peer
at the interstate
through the saline film of pain
that wracked my vision, made me moan
and blink and shake my head
and close one eye and then the other
a second at a time--
All this at sixty miles per hour--
Unable to see the speeding blur
of traffic all around.
So this was it: I was sure
I'd hit another car--
Blinded, frightened, finally,
I got the us to the curb, and she
ask if I'd heard a voice:

"Paul, why do you persecute me?"

Consistent Pentameter

Man, I totally forgot how easy pentameter is compared to an irregular metrical form. I've been writing these Veintets (twenty line poems with odd metrical patterns and overlapping rhyme schemes), and haven't written a plain old, straight through pentameter poem in a while. I used to write an entire poetry blog in pentameter, so I forgot how easy and fun it is.

Oh the poem in question is to be found on my other blog, by the by. It's a new blog which is going to be just for meditations on scripture: sermons, poems, notes, reflections, whatever. Check it out.

Torch and Trumpet, Empty Pots, and God

[Crossposted on my new blog, Eat This Scroll.]

He woke from a dream of fire:
hundreds of children holding mason jars
full of captured stars
buzzing in the glass like molten bees.
He woke to the sound of fire:
three-round bursts, the tintinnabular
nightmare symphonies
of battle-cries and sirens through the trees
and all throughout the tents
the men were in a panic, shooting far
of the mark, rifles seized
by riotous spirits, each lieutenant's
sudden imcompetence
raining death upon his own allies.
He falls down to his knees
as the night explodes beyond the barbed-wire fence.
Far off, the enemy cries
"A sword for the Lord and Gideon!" at the skies,
which have dawned upon
a history full of hideous precedents.