Day – 64 – Villanelle #2 – The burden to be a man!

​Hold head high within a cage,

Or look down as I soar through the sky, 

Be a man or be free?

On the sight of oppression I rage,

Scream and bleed, I’d rather die,

Than to hold head high within a cage.

But I wish I could meet a mage

With his white dazzling magic, clarify,

To be a man or be free?

My responsibilities, I carefully gauge,

To fulfill them, with all might, I try,

To hold head high within a cage.

But it’s not an easy war to wage,

The rusting cage runs my soul dry,

I ponder again, be a man or be free?

I am in need of the skills of an old sage

To let go of the dream right before my eye.

All this to hold head high within a false cage!

Neither being a man nor be free!

                                 ~

Writing a villanelle is like an adventure, you never know what you come up with until you write the last word. Most of my poems are that way, anyway! I changed the restraining lines a bit to fit the specific tercets.

For those of you who don’t know what villanelle is – villanelle (also known as villanesque)^[1] is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain.

And the link to Wikipedia.

Part of my #The100DaysOfPoetryLearning project. You can read all of my poems here.

Advertisement