blue eons observe

lone silence’s ire,

in it yells a curse

to rile oceans;

to rouse bile in us,

 

yet envoys arise

to yearn,

to learn

in soul’s urn

obverse to ruin;

converse orations

annul bribes;

no absolutions

in love’s alibis

yet our orisons

vault bliss;

collide in visions

sincere in resolve;

 

a true universe;

entire, uncut,

never inert

or in stasis,

you or I slivers

silver lit

in traverse,

 

stories yet alive

to salve cruel burns;

cast out evil lies,

see Venus return

to bees in our vines,

 

olive coronets

revel in roots,

our noetics

seal routes

in scent or soil;

in verbs or toil

our vital essence

calls you

as trees bore oil,

Our brass

belies nerves to uncoil;

in reverence,

to all,

 

our voices run

invisible

as neroli conveys

sun traces

in one caress;

rebellious air obeys

a verse unseen,

no less,

 

a sense in us

lasts

via nouns,

or sundry acts;

 

in vast cultures’

obscure ancestry

are our

ears, eyes, body;

our novels

never absence

stars once bore,

one star in us

unreels to lionise,

yes, core, tales, bone,

by you, I live on.

 

Antonia Sara Zenkevitch

This is the second of two responses to VJ’s Weekly Challenge, this week the theme was resilience but we were asked not to use the word directly in our creative efforts. My first, more personal response can be read here.

Each line of this poem is a partial anagram of the phrase ‘but to say you believe in our resilience’, which is harder than it sounds. Trying to write with no use of ‘d’, ‘g’, ‘h’, ‘p’, ‘m’ etc. and a maximum of one ‘a’, one ‘t’, one ‘c’ per line was particularly challenging. So was limiting the use of ‘s’, ‘b’, ‘r’ and ‘l’ to a maximum of two per line. Finding rhymes or rhythms in anagrams was interesting, the latter partly defined by the need to structure lines so letters aren’t repeated too often while trying to make sure the flow is retained.  I recommend using partial anagrams of a phrase to create poetry as an exercise; whatever the results, it really gets you thinking about words and how we use them.