Birthday Bouquet

The birthday bouquet
is more than a week old
and wilting in the vase

A shapely vase of glass
half-filled with scummy water
glinting in the sun

A mixture of flowers
raise heads in a last hurrah
of purple and pale yellow

Brown-tinged leaves hang
over the lip of the vase
over like the birthday

Small white roses
struggle to peek above
the flaccid foliage

They seem as fresh
as the day the bouquet
arrived in a van

Kim M. Russell, 22nd August 2024

Merril is our host at this week’s Meeting the Bar at the dVerse Poets Pub, where we are exploring the Triversen, a form invented by the American poet and physician William Carlos Williams. She says that “there seems to be a considerable difference in what constitutes a Triversen (“triple verse sentence”). So she has given us a simplified version.

According to the basic rules, the Triversen is an imagistic poem that consists of tercets, each of which is a grammatical sentence, broken by breaths, the accents and rhythms of normal speech, ideally, two to four beats or stressed syllable (not total syllables). The Triversen is unrhymed, with an ideal length of 18 lines or 6 stanzas, but even Williams did not always follow that rule. Furthermore, alliteration contributes to the stress syllables. Merril has given us an example, ‘On Gay Wallpaper’ by William Carlos Williams.

Our challenge is to write a Triversen poem, following the given rules, on any subject. Merril has suggested looking around wherever we are and writing about something in the room (as in Williams’ wallpaper), or the view from a window.

34 thoughts on “Birthday Bouquet”

  1. Thank you for writing to the prompt, Kim! I like how you write that the flowers have faded, just as the birthday has, but still

    “A mixture of flowers
    raise heads in a last hurrah
    of purple and pale yellow”

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    1. Thank you, Ain. I don’t usually like cut flowers, which belong outdoors, but this bouquet was from my daughter, and the flowers in it were unusual.

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  5. Interesting juxtaposition of the flowers’ beauty and fragility, Kim! There’s something particularly compelling to that final matter-of-fact tercet, which reads to my eye as a reminder of how beautiful things are often more ordinary than we might expect.

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  7. “A shapely vase of glass
    half-filled with scummy water
    glinting in the sun”
    I love how realistic this is, it makes me think of plants I’ve cut and placed in glass jars. After so many days the water starts growing green.

    “A mixture of flowers
    raise heads in a last hurrah”
    I love the beauty in these lines.

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    Reply

  9. The eternal dilemma about how long to wait before throwing flowers away, the memory of them in their pomp, the meaning of the celebratory gift versus the most definite signs of mortality – beautifully captured Kim…

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. I don’t usually have cut flowers in the house, I prefer to leave them in the garden, but these were from Ellen, and I wanted to get the most out of them, 12 days!

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