NaPoWriMo Day 20: Broken music

 
Day 20 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Below, you’ll find Theodore Roethke’s poem, In Evening Air. The rhythm is odd, the rhymes are too, and the language is strangely prophetic and not at all “conversational.” Your challenge is, with this poem in mind, to write a poem informed by musical phrasing or melody, that employs some form of soundplay (rhyme, meter, assonance, alliteration).

 
Broken music
 
1
 
We walk among the skinny sacred trees
within a kind of broken music.
This life exists outside of time,
caught in the hum, the gaps between lines,
our own limitations endless –
the potential of things greater.
 
2
 
Something tells me that you’re listening.
It’s a crackle in the air sometimes,
a twig caught in fire,
scarlet embers betwixt times,
when the Wheel begins to yearn to turn,
its axis never spinning out of echo.
 
3
 
We walk barefoot, others skinny dip,
set the woods in motion with our script,
endless. It’s all a dream conjured,
a dizzy ride of travelling planets
shielding the moon gathering her boa of starlight,
unkempt, naked.
 
4
 
And so we are one sometimes.
If we want to be. If time prevails to be so.
We set the world’s tightrope in spin,
cancel all our obligations to dream.
See our plight. Feel the hour of our being.
Be at peace in your waking.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 23, 2025
 
I took the phrase ‘broken music’ from In Evening Air