NaPoWriMo (Day 27): Invasion

 
 For the month of April, I’m writing a poem a day from prompts on https://www.napowrimo.net. You can click on the headlines (Day One, etc) to view/add comments. There’s also a list of participants’ sites below the site header.

27
 
Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a “duplex.” A “duplex” is a variation on the sonnet, developed by the poet Jericho Brown. Here’s one of his first “Duplex” poems, and here is a duplex written by the poet I.S. Jones. Like a typical sonnet, a duplex has fourteen lines. It’s organized into seven, two-line stanzas. The second line of the first stanza is echoed by (but not identical to) the first line of the second stanza, the second line of the second stanza is echoed by (but not identical to) the first line of the third stanza, and so on. The last line of the poem is the same as the first.
 

Invasion

 
You can feel the chill of death divide the sky.
From dawn til dusk the cruel torrent falls.
 
There is never a pause from dawn til dusk,
as we listen for the siren call to pierce the quiet.
 
The sirens and the bombs pierce the night,
down to the metro, where we hide our heads.
 
We hide our heads hoping for a new tomorrow,
but this has been our dismal fate for months.
 
This cannot be our fate, to have to suffer like this;
we are bombarded, tortured and intimidated,
 
but still we stand, bombarded, intimidated as we are.
Some of us have lost our fathers, our wives, our babes.
 
Only yesterday we embraced our fathers, wives, our babes.
You can feel the chill of death divide the sky.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 27, 2022