"The Night Bivouac of Napoleon's Army" by Vasily Vereshchagin

‘The Breaking Season’ by Annabelle Fuller

January 21, 2018

Lips, soft as velvet, primrose pink,
Are rent the blue of bruising ink.
They rive and crackle in the cold,
Retract in tissue paper folds;
Corroded strips as flayed as zinc
Teased grey and gaunt, and growing old.

Faint silver sands shake down like snow,
Days melting slowly in the glow
Of raindrop spheres which sadly swirl.
The epilogues of chilled limbs curl
And only snowdrop shells can grow,
Their petal stems all sharply furled.

Ice strives to anodise the throat
And strangle any golden note.
Breath hovers in a frozen cloud
And ripples like a rimy shroud.
The season seeks to crow and gloat
In icy crowns, all poised and proud.

Frost sleeps within our brittle bones
And clots white water into stone:
Fish paralysed in glassy halls
As daylight ebbs and verglas crawls.
Each speck of life is quite alone
And cloaked in misty coffin palls.

The year’s last act is spliced and split
With wintry whips and heaven-spit.
They sting the skull and smart the skin,
Their lustrous coldness puncturing
Our lungs in silent censorship.
They dare the year to reach the spring.

Annabelle Fuller is a student and poet from Yorkshire who writes for The Indiependent. She has had poems displayed in the V&A, Sigmund Freud Museum and Oxford University Church, and won her category of the Ilkley Literature Festival in 2016 and 2017. Her work can also be found in New Poetry Magazine and on the Poetry Society website.

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9 Responses

Lenore January 21, 2018

So glad to see beautiful poetry like this on the Society’s page. Thank you.

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James A. Tweedie January 22, 2018

Annabelle,

Thank you for your chilling vision captured in an innovative rhyhmic scheme (no doubt familiar to those more “versed” in such matters than I am). Everything is lovely but several turns of phrase strike me as particularly elegant. Some of my favorites include:

Days melting slowly in the glow
Of raindrop spheres…

Breath hovers in a frozen cloud…

And clots white water into stone…

Although this is a cliche I mean it as a sincere compliment: “You have a way with words.” Indeed!

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Leonard Dabydeen January 22, 2018

Beautiful and timely seasonal poem. Enjoy its rhyme scheme in iambic tetrameter. Like stanza four …” Frost sleeps within our brittle bones/ ….”. Welcome Spring. TFS, Annabelle Fuller.

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- James A. Tweedie January 22, 2018
  
  Leonard, I appreciate your nod to my query but it’s the aabbab pattern I was curious about (I typed “rhythmic pattern” instead of my intended “rhyming pattern”). Does this pattern have a name? is it common or rare? It certainly adds depth and richness to the repetitive tetrameter it embraces. A successful choice.
  
  Reply
David Watt January 22, 2018

I also loved your many memorable phrases. Those already mentioned plus:

‘The year’s last act is spliced and split
With wintry whips and heaven-spit.’

I look forward to reading more of your work.

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James Sale January 23, 2018

Like this a lot: “They dare the year to reach the spring.” – superb last line.

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Annabelle Fuller January 23, 2018

Thank you for the comments, everyone! I’m glad that rhythm and rhyme have been well received.

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Fr. Richard Libby January 31, 2018

Rhyme, meter, language . . . it’s all there! Well done!

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Hibah Shabkhez February 1, 2018

Deliciously spooky. The kind of thing one remembers later on, and whispers over hot chocolate in a biting early morning wind.

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