The Renku Sessions: Many Shapes – Week 8
Welcome to this renku session. I am Linda Papanicolaou and I’ll be your guide.
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CHOICE OF VERSE 8
Love verses are important special topics in renku. They occur in groups of two or three verses to develop the theme, which is human carnal desire and romance. Longer renku like kasen will have a couple of love pairs, while shisan has one. Verse 7 was our first love verse, in line with a “first sight of potential lover” subtopic, so verse 8 needs a two-line verse whose possible sub-topics include flirting, longing, trysts, or the end of love, without letting the two tell a particular story.
Here’s a selection from this week’s offers, one from each participant. I’ve also included the previous and leap-over verses so you can enjoy how each of the offers would sit in the poem:
swallows departing
fieldfares arriving
Andrew Shimield
a cool tattoo
on the back of the neck
of the boy in front
Marion Clarke
——
another martini with
two olives and a room key
Scott Anderson
pitching a sweet line
he shares his private lair
Stephanie Bauer
sharing a quilt
we count the shooting stars
Belinda Behne
fortune cookies shared
with a lover in bed
Nancy Brady
illicit lovers
plot their prison break
Tracy Davidson
nude bodies reveal
more fine art
M. R. Defibaugh
that old sweet tingle
up and down my spine
Lorin Ford
the totality
when he touches me
Pamela Garry
Taylor exposes her
pillow talk with Travis
Valerie Green
bite marks conspicuously
vampirish
Michael Henry Lee
his cat and her dog
learn to get along
Laurinda Lind
all their secrets under
the warm patterned duvet
Urszula Marciniak
his picture gathers dust
around the edges
Sean Murphy
burying your face
in the jasmine
Guliz Mutlu
her shy smile at me
from behind the bridal veil
Pauline O’Carolan
rising moon so
our love so fierce
Nick O’Connor
our messages
above her husband’s name
Travis Park
he asks her to trim
his bonsai again
Andrew Pineo
tryst on a bridge
the street lamp comes on
Anton R-kelian
eye to eye we trace
our way down
Clysta Seney
drums and bagpipes
feeding a kinky mood
Richard Straw
The verse we’re going to place is Pamela’s “totality.” It takes us from sight to touch, and from specifics of an item of body art to the totality of erotic passion and beyond. What I appreciate in Pamela’s choice of wording is that “totality” is a term we most often use for lunar or solar eclipses. In Greco-Roman mythology the sun, Helios/Apollo is a male god and Selene/ Luna—the moon—is female. In Japanese cosmology, the genders are reversed. Amaratsu, the sun is female and Tsukiyomi, the moon, is male. Whichever, an eclipse is one divine body covering another, which enlarges its sense of human sexuality. Here then are versus seven and eight, and we move on with verse nine to finish the third side:
a cool tattoo
on the back of the neck
of the boy in front
Marion Clarke
the totality
when he touches me
Pamela Garry
CALL FOR VERSE 9:
This will be a three-line verse seasoned winter, and the last of our third side. As always, link to the previous verse (totality) and shift away from the leap-over verse (cool tattoo).
Please use the submission box below to submit no more than two verses for verse 9. Submissions will close on Monday, September 21 at midnight, US Eastern time. Selection of the verse and instructions for submitting to verse 10 will appear here on Thursday, September 24.
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