“Tomorrow”, the 10th poem from my second collection, Unreconciled Doors, comes in the form of a Prosody (cool word!). The eponymous refrain is untypical as it starts most verses rather than finishing them, and is one word rather than a series of words or commands.
I wrote the first verse, which has a syllabic structure of 3/7/7/6, and tried (unsuccessfully) to maintain this in the subsequent verses. Of course, the title and idea for something to fill a blank page is always connected to your interests and what you enjoy.Mine being Music and in particular, the Beatles, I essentially used “Yesterday” as the template ,(but “Tomorrow Never Knows” may have been a better one!)
The concept of “Tomorrow” suited me also a word that ended in a W on the page but was actually an “O” sounding ending like many English words that hung onto their original French. W, the secret vowel of the English language.
The visual imagery I chose to start the poem, concerns murmuration and “dusk’s concentric swallows”. This was an image that I had heard a lot about and probably seen once or twice , the “Sort Sol” or Black Sun in Denmark, in particular ,in the marshes of Southern Jutland. Think Ireland but with different accents.
The second verse relates tomorrow to something that has not happened yet like a very analogue example- “An undeveloped photo” along with the images that have not yet been captured.
There is a change of tack in the third verse, as it opens with the three syllable “To go home” rather than “Tomorrow”. Here again I took liberally from the Liverpool school and Mc Cartney’s change to “Suddenly” rather than “Yesterday” in one of the verses. This verse in the poem is probably the saddest ,as ironically in a poem about a future day, it deals with a past that can’t be kept or lived in.
For the concluding verse, I wanted to use some musical language and some dualism.
“Piano” in it’s original meaning in Italian is “Soft” (The full name of the musical instrument being PianoForte or Piano/Soft plus Forte/Strong, describing the range of sounds that the octaves could produce). I couldn’t resist throwing in another Italian musical term either- “Staccato” -which means a note of shortened duration-it’s essentially like you are stabbing the keys and pulling back quickly. A great example of this might be the verses of Tom Jone’s “Delilah” whose detached notes build drama until resolved in a grand chorus.
Catch you all … Tomorrow.
Unreconciled Doors is available to order in Kindle format now on Amazon for just $€£ 0.99 or read for free with Kindle Unlimited
If you like and if you can, having being delighted by this daily dose of dissonance, maybe Buy Me a Coffee please ,or even better, order Unreconciled Doors, so you can read along with Behind the Lines
Algo Poetry-Behind the Lines 