The song comes back the second I sit still,some chorus from a year I can't quite place —I never learned the words, just how they feel.
It finds me washing dishes, at the sill,or stopped at lights, my hand against my face.The song comes back the second I sit still.
My mother hummed it, working, by the till,her voice gone thin with love and lack of grace.I never learned the words, just how they feel.
Some tunes are built for memory, not skill —they don't need lyrics to hold down a place.The song comes back the second I sit still.
I've tried to search it out, against my will,to name the thing that keeps me in her trace.I never learned the words, just how they feel.
I've learned to let it come. Perhaps that's skill —to hold what calls you from a vanished place.The song comes back the second I sit still.I never learned the words, just how they feel.
About the villanelleA nineteen-line poem where two lines return again and again like a tide.
A villanelle has nineteen lines in six stanzas, and only two rhyme sounds. Its first and third lines come back as refrains, so the poem circles what it cannot stop thinking about, each return landing a little differently.
The shape Five tercets rhyming aba, then a quatrain rhyming abaa; line one and line three recur as refrains.
Listen for The same two lines coming back, meaning slightly changed by what surrounds them.
4 poems in this form →@thandi
Can tell you the exact song playing during any important moment of her life.
5 poems · 2 readings received · 2 written · 0 followers
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