On the Wings of a Northern Nanny

It starts with skitter of claw and whirr of wing,
a battalion of ragged cormorants wrestling wild,
ends with a sudden crunch like bones or antlers.

With a sense of being elf-shot – sleet’s sharp sting –
we cling together, yet unreconciled
with nature hurling branches, bowling boulders.

There’s devastation all along the winding
homeward path, up past the church, the field
where wild winds whistle, capriole and roister.

Our collars up, our wind-blown hair is flying;
we wrestle with the north wind unbeguiled.
The old lantern’s by the door as ever,

calm glimmer in the madness of the swirling,
reprieve and welcome to a cosy evening.

Kim M. Russell, 14th November 2024

Image by Khamkéo on Unsplash

This Thursday at the dVerse Poets Pub, Laura is our host for her penultimate Meeting the Bar of 2024 with a trillonet of wild winds. She says she’s taking a lead from the Anglo Saxons, who called November the ‘wind monath’.

She has shared poetry from Shelley and Lola Ridge to inspire us to write about a wild wind, generic or particular, and include it in our titles or just as part of our poems. We can use personification, description, metaphor, scenic backdrop – the options are open.

However, since today is the fourteenth, the style of our poems must follow a version of a sonnet called the trillonet, which has fourteen lines made up of four tercets and ends with a rhyming couplet. The rhyme scheme is ABC, ABC, ABC, ABC, AA (or BB or CC or DD). It is usually in iambic pentameter or iambic tetrameter. Tricky!

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