Shivering, the young woman stepped outside pulling on the toggle of her duffle coat shielding herself from the blistering wind Just after five and darkness had already fallen as she headed west on the tree-lined avenue
An old man sat quietly in the corner of the café Staring into his bottomless cup of coffee Ignoring hunger pains, twiddling with the hole in the left finger of his old gloves His head filled with memories suppressed
An elegant woman sat upright with a fixed smile He, a puffed up blowhard, at the microphone Commanding attention with his loud voice and phony diatribe as kiss-asses drooled Her body ached and her mind lived in the past
A lifetime ago two kids had clung to each other Inseparable, joined at the hip, in love She from the house on the hill, privileged He from the other side of the railroad tracks His intellect and her beauty, a winning combo
The young woman saw him in the cafe, head lowered It had been a long time passing before her call to him Entering he looked up at her, eyes clouded, and she went to him Her father embraced her and she clung to him tightly He needed to know his one true love was dying
Bjorn is hosting D'Verse Poets and has prompted us with a form called Cadralor. The cadralor is a poem of 5, unrelated, numbered stanzaic images, each of which can stand alone as a poem, is fewer than 10 lines, and ideally constrains all stanzas to the same number of lines. Imagery is crucial to cadralore: each stanza should be a whole, imagist poem, almost like a scene from a film, or a photograph. The fifth stanza acts as the crucible, alchemically pulling the unrelated stanzas together into a love poem. By “love poem,” we mean that your fifth stanza illuminates a gleaming thread that runs obliquely through the unrelated stanzas and answers the compelling question: “For what do you yearn?”
Image by Please Don't sell My Artwork AS IS from Pixabay
