• Week 39 • Huitain •

The Language

Under brindled shade of beech
and chestnut, where Sunday’s ease
loiters near the exit, we teach
each other in tangled degrees,
braid languages like vines. The wood
records, our hands shape, flutter, touch,
while all the rest is understood
and lost amongst the pheasant’s clutch.

A French form, the Huitain is an 8-line, 8-syllable (hence ‘huit’) poem with a rhyme scheme a,b,a,b,c,b,c,b.