• Week 3 • Ya Du •

Creative Drought – A Ya Du

These doubts harass,
mind-laps assert
their sass and guile
in tapestries,
blind corners, and in cool fallacies

Down corridors
dampened roars won’t
stay moored for long,
yet eons blow
between my doubt and an ember’s glow

And, squeezed, the word
funnels, birdlike,
transferred to hand,
Oak from samphire.
Heard, the ghost of Orpheus’ lyre.

A Ya Du is a Burmese form consisting of 3 stanzas, and each stanza consisting of 5 lines. The first four lines of each stanza has four syllables while the 5th line can have 5, 7, 9 or 11 syllables (I have gone with 9 in this instance.
A visual as well as a musical poem, the Ya Du also uses a climbing rhyme, as follows:

– – – a
– – a –
– b – a
– b – –