365 Poems in 365 Days: Elf Poems 1
1. The Second Age, Twelfth Cycle, Year of the Dancing Hawk
In the morning of our lives
All the world is a garden for the fey.
The wild ocean, home of storm and swell,
The high plateau, running with wild horses,
In mortal cities where our songs are as precious as gold,
Under the canopy, as the trees are lashed with rain,
Watching tornadoes as the desert shows it’s rage.
The cycle of the seasons teaches us
That only through discipline and order
Do we have freedom to live our lives.
The rituals and courtesies
The patient formalities
That mortals misunderstand –
This is not who we are,
But what we must do
To most become ourselves.
Introduction. This is the first of a set of 10 poems, from the point of view of an immortal elf. The time period covered is hundreds, if not thousands of years. I have attempted to change the style of each one to reflect this, but not enormously for the extra-fictional reason that I wrote the first draft of all of them on one afternoon, and also because with a population of immortals, language and style would remain stable across long historical periods. Obviously Tolkien's elves were the big influence, but I'm also drawing from some Norse and English myths as well as the interesting Japanese flavoured version in Tad William's Memory Sorrow and Thorn. Mostly though I've just made some stuff up.
Also, they mostly don't rhyme and the rhythm pretty gets loose at times. If this leads you to conclude that they are not poems, I'm okay with that.
As I posted these out of order as blogger displays most recent post first, this is actually the last of these I've written up. In the larger project this is number 100 of 365.
In the morning of our lives
All the world is a garden for the fey.
The wild ocean, home of storm and swell,
The high plateau, running with wild horses,
In mortal cities where our songs are as precious as gold,
Under the canopy, as the trees are lashed with rain,
Watching tornadoes as the desert shows it’s rage.
The cycle of the seasons teaches us
That only through discipline and order
Do we have freedom to live our lives.
The rituals and courtesies
The patient formalities
That mortals misunderstand –
This is not who we are,
But what we must do
To most become ourselves.
Introduction. This is the first of a set of 10 poems, from the point of view of an immortal elf. The time period covered is hundreds, if not thousands of years. I have attempted to change the style of each one to reflect this, but not enormously for the extra-fictional reason that I wrote the first draft of all of them on one afternoon, and also because with a population of immortals, language and style would remain stable across long historical periods. Obviously Tolkien's elves were the big influence, but I'm also drawing from some Norse and English myths as well as the interesting Japanese flavoured version in Tad William's Memory Sorrow and Thorn. Mostly though I've just made some stuff up.
Also, they mostly don't rhyme and the rhythm pretty gets loose at times. If this leads you to conclude that they are not poems, I'm okay with that.
As I posted these out of order as blogger displays most recent post first, this is actually the last of these I've written up. In the larger project this is number 100 of 365.
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