Incremental Poetry ~ 48 Lines

When We First Embraced

Do you remember when we first embraced?
Your arms surrounded me, shut out the fear—
of joy you gave me oh, so sweet a taste.

Do you remember when we lingered near?
To me it was akin to paradise,
to be so close to you, your whispers hear.

And I remember well your sage advice:
to slowly walk where others boldly tread,
for caution is a worthy sacrifice.

How many times we chose to talk instead
of giving in to passion’s flaming fire,
for the two of us remained as yet unwed.

Our conversations led us to aspire
to greater depths of true, implicit trust,
and take our friendship up to levels higher.

It wasn’t that we never fought with lust,
or had to stop ourselves from giving in,
for we are weak, our bodies made of dust.

We could not dwell on things that might have been,
but lived from day to day with no regrets—
we had to exercise self-discipline.

Had others spied our evening silhouettes,
they would have seen us happy and care-free
as we rehearsed our singular duets.

The songs we wrote were filled with harmony,
and both our voices blended into one;
we sang at every opportunity.

Then one sad day, we thought the music done,
for orders came that took me far away;
and overhead, the dark clouds hid the sun.

I had to go, but longed so much to stay;
you could not hold me there, try as you might;
now, more than ever, we began to pray.

Do you recall, when I was out of sight,
how, through the glass, I saw you once again?
Your smile, like magic, chased away the night.

And so a new tradition soon began
of melting miles by way of text and talk;
we understood this was God’s master plan.

When Abba works, it does no good to balk,
but humbly to His perfect will submit,
while learning ever more with Him to walk.

Our song lives on—the music we commit
to Him who holds the future in His hand.
Though absent, more and more our hearts are knit.

We’re closer now, and all is as He planned,
and I am blessed to be with friendship graced—
Unspoken words are written in the sand.

 

Copyright © 2019 Abigail Gronway – All Rights Reserved

Welcome to my series, Incremental Poetry, where each week (or as often as I am able) the featured poem will be one line longer than the one I shared the week before. As the poems get longer, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to keep up the weekly pace, especially when I have to search high and low for a form that employs the set number of lines. But I am nothing if not tenacious. (My husband calls it stubborn.) And so I will keep pressing on toward my goal of a 100-line poem, even if there are weeks of silence between my compositions. As always, thank you kindly for stopping by.

Scansion:
Terza Rima
Terza rima is comprised of any number of tercets with interlocking rhyme (aba bcb cdc, etc.).
Terza rima may end one of three ways:
1) with a single line that rhymes with the center line of the preceding stanza
Example: aba bcb cdc d
2) with two lines that both rhyme with the center line of the preceding stanza
Example: aba bcb cdc dd
3) with three lines that reverse the rhyme of the preceding stanza
Example: aba bcb cdc dcd

Note: I forgot the details of rule #3 when writing my Terza Rima and ended with a rhyming pattern of pap instead of pop, tying the final stanza back to the first stanza. If I were writing for a contest, I would change that line to correct the rhyming pattern.