A Riff on Infatuation

I have fallen in love with dragonflies,
vicious predators that make me look a fool.

	I watch for dragonflies, and feel like a fool,
        transfixed by their buzzing and spangling.

How those devil’s darning needles keep spangling!
I love to watch them hover and flicker

	but summer light will soon begin to flicker,
	and the riverbank’s vibrant jewels will fade.

Will my infatuation begin to fade
when autumn glows in leaf and berry?

	There’s a darter the colour of a berry,
        and I’m off to watch its acrobatic show.

Through chilly months I’ll miss their entrancing show.
I've fallen in love and here be dragonflies.

Kim M. Russell, 27th July 2023

Image by Matthieu Rochette on Unsplash

At the dVerse Poets Pub we are meeting the bar with Merril and writing duplex form poems, which Merril tells us is a ‘very recent form invented by Jericho Brown in 2018’, combining the forms of ghazal, sonnet, and blues. She has not only given us the basic components of the form but also a link to Brown’s explanation of the form. Tricky, but the examples Merril has given us help.

Merrill says that this form is not easy to get right the first time and that, for this prompt, we must at least write a 14 line poem in couplets, where the second line of each couplet is partially repeated in the first line of the next couplet, and the first line is at least partially repeated in the last line.

34 thoughts on “A Riff on Infatuation”

  1. This is absolutely lovely, Kim! I especially resonate with; “Will my infatuation begin to fade when autumn glows in leaf and berry?” ❤️❤️

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  2. Thank you so much for trying the form. I thought perhaps you had tried it for NaPoWriMo (I didn’t then).
    I especially love your opening line and then how you played on “here be dragons” with your final line! 🌟 🐉🪰

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