• Week 36 • Common Measure •

For My Sister and Mother

each of us elsewhere, chasing dragons,
we, the daughters of fire,
each on the flank of our volcanoes,
elsewhere, map-free and warmed.

And should our skillfully freeform hearts
be disregarded or
their trails freeze in the frame, we’ll cut them
loose and grow them anew.

Know that where pain flutters brightest is
never in severance,
only in the grub-green of the bud.
Remember all those plans

incubated, cocooned in distance
in a distant city
had no distance, each and the other,
in the place that heals.

Common or Hymnal measure generally follows a galloping iambic line pattern of 4, 3, 4, 3 in an AbAb scheme. I have seen rhyming and non-rhyming, and after about 5 minutes of listing potential rhymes, I caved to the ease of rhyme-free.