{pf: the p7 get dizzied by dizains}

The new month has burst upon us like …well, a lot like a sudden shower of rain. Because we keep having those. And I am not even mad about it. We’ve also got early strawberries at the Farmer’s Market, so… you win some… and then you win some more, if you have a hat in the car.

May is National Mental Health month, and this is my annual – weekly? – reminder to you all to be excellent one to another, because truly — “A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees.” – Amelia Earhart. After all, it’s SPRING! Time to make things grow, good people.


Poetry Princess Sara challenged us to dizains this month, which turned out to be… oddly mechanical. We were discussing how sometimes poetry seems to require us to …look things up and make specific connections with definitions and distinctions in order for mere words to turn into wordplay. The French poetic form dizain (not to be confused with dizaine which either means a decade or “about ten” in French) is regimented – ten lines, ten syllables per line, and a strict rhyme scheme – ababbccdcd. I found myself looking up things which were square, or ten, because it felt awkward, at first! I found that the form kind of builds on itself, and halfway through, the rhyme pattern begins to echo the pattern from the beginning, building a kind of square. Sara decided we could have a bonus point if we used the word “square” in our poems (from the Imaginary Point-Giving Poetry Body), so off we went.

My first poem was kind of a joke – my siblings and I play cards at my parents’ house once a month, in order to see them and each other more regularly, and we were making a disorderly mess last weekend, and my father was patiently …doing dishes. While we played. This is not the pattern of my childhood AT ALL, so that was… spectacularly weird, to be honest. But it got me thinking how much we girls (and my poor lone brother) disrupted my father’s #goals for order and peace. And, since my Dad was a bricklayer just out of high school, and that uses square…

Netherlands 2018 690

All the bricks you could want.

Daughters, Or Things That Messed Up Dad’s Life

Brick by brick, the Mason’s art constructed
Scaffolding, hod, cement in balance tied
Calculus, a symphony conducted
With “joints” and “beds,” and squarely dignified
As sums meet stone, and stone is satisfied.
Bull-nosed – both brick and man – he made life’s call
For “soldiers” in a row, chaos forestall.
No fickle furbelow accommodate
Geometry the goal, once and for all.
But Life provides girl-chaos to frustrate…

(I was reminded that CHILDREN, not just daughters, are the point of chaos, and so I concede. However, a good soldier makes do, and my father has.) That was a good entry poem for me, because I got to use a lot of technical terms (soldiers is a way to lay bricks – in a specific line. Who knew! [Well, Dad, probably]) and got to grips with the weird rhyme scheme. I decided to look further at squares… with dance.

Having attended religious schools my whole life, I never experienced the “fun” so many of my friends and relatives complained about (middle school + dancing for PE = tales of woe). I can’t square dance – or dance at all – but was delighted to discover that for an allegedly simple country dance, square dance has tons of serious adherents and technical terms. A ‘promenade’ is itself a whole dance subgenre! So, I was off again:

Treasure Island 35

Around the Quad

The Promenade brings sweethearts, two by two
With mincing steps, into a perfect square.
Striding in step along the avenue
Forward-and-back, the dancers walk on air
A ‘side-by-side’ that’s truly debonair.
Seeing – and being seen – the highest goal
As gents and ladies proudly take a stroll.
Walk where the lights are bright – all eyes on you
And never mind the critics on patrol —
Just do-si-do on to your rendezvous.


But, wait, there’s more! Sara’s poem uses more technical builder‘s terms, Liz is all science. Rebecca is, of course, quantum science, while Tricia found myriad other disciplines. Poetry Princesses Kelly, Andi, and Laura are off creating their own experiments elsewhere this month.

Need a bit more poetry? Poetry Friday today is hosted by the fabulous Jama-j, at Jama’s Alphabet Soup.

Glasgow Botanic Gardens T 15

One last Mental Health Month reminder: “Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.” – Lao Tzu