Sunday Mini Challenge: How about the nightly visits?

“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”

John Lennon

A while ago one of the co-authors of our short-story collection challenged me to write a poem that describing the horrors of nightmares. How it affects you, how you feel unable to move or scream. The helplessness when it's no fence between you and yourself. So I came back with a poem…

I’m sure you can do a lot better, but …

I also needed illustrations and this led me to the fantastic work of Fancisco Goya (1746-1828). Just searching for disturbing paintings you will find Goya on the top of your search.  His imagination and dark fantasies might even been one of the reasons that he spend time in an asylum. Take care when dwelling in darkness.

Fore a comprehensive view  take a look at Los Caprichos,  a collection of 80 etchings, where each one is almost enough to make your dreams dark. Actually every painting can be a title of a poem.

He also painted horrors of war, he painted dark mythology, He painted blood and gore, he painted black, but even if you look closely on some of his portraits he did for the Spanish court, there is always something something sinister, something ugly or cruel.

So for today’s challenge I want you to take a careful look at Goya, and think about your own nightmares, maybe there is a consistent theme, or maybe it’s more the feeling of waking up entangled in suffocating bedsheets, or with a feeling that you are not alone. Maybe you have woken up and simply have to go and check that the door is locked.

You might even take a look at the world today and wonder if nightmares are all that different from reality. Something Goya also noticed in his Disasters of war. Maybe this is how Yeats see nightmares and reality becoming one:

The Second Coming

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Link up a new fresh poem on nightmares, I know it will be fantastic, I know I will not read anything right before going to bed.

For those of you who prefer to be inspired by music, I find that “Moon over Bourbon Street” can inspire to some nightmare emotions. After all there are always those soft footfalls following you at night.

Remember to visit other contributions, and sleep well.

Sunday Form Challenge - Yeats' Octaves

William Butler Yeats is a poet who needs no introduction. He is considered to be one of the foremost poets of the Twentieth Century. He is firmly established as a modern poet, yet he drew his influences from traditional Irish ballads and songs, writing extensively in rhymed verse. His earlier poems utilized quatrains, but for his later and most famous works, he preferred the octave as a stanza form.

File Photo - Fair Use

The Yeats Octave

The basic structure of this 8 line stanza is iambic tetrameter or pentameter (eight or ten syllable lines for those who do not feel comfortable working with meter), with the rhyme scheme:
a b b a c d d c. The poem may then consist of any number of stanzas.

This pattern can be seen in his poem, Two Songs from a Play, which explores the end of Greek paganism. I have reproduced the first stanza here.

I saw a staring virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side.
And lay the heart upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away;
And then did all the Muses sing
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God's death were but a play.

Ottava Rima

Yeats worked extensively with Ottava Rima in his later work. The significant difference between this and the previous octave form is the rhyme scheme, which is a b a b a b c c. Iambic pentameter is the favoured meter. This structure forms the basis of the stanzas in many of his poems, including Sailing to Byzantium.

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —
Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.


Our challenge this weekend is to create a poem, using either octave forms, of between one and four stanzas. The format challenge is posted on Saturday to allow for an extended period of time to work on a new poem. The Linky remains open, but you may prefer to link up on Monday instead. Please provide a link back to this challenge, if you do so. Only poems written specifically for this challenge may be linked up to this post.

Mini-Challenge: Masks

my younger son at age 2

It's already Christmas in some stores - a total rip for we who favor the autumnal, and perhaps more pagan, annual ritual of Halloween. 

Last week I laid down in an aisle hosting Halloween candy and costumes alongside Christmas decorations and little baby Jesi, just to get a sense of the confusion that wee tykes might get from the layers of commercialism assaulting their tender eyes, ears, and bellies, but then security came by - or at least, someone wearing an ill-fitting blue suit and an aluminum badge, carrying a flashlight despite the high fluorescent lights - and told me I was scaring the customers, and besides, he had just cleaned up a little "accident" on the carpet and I really didn't want to be laying down just there, if you know what I mean.

Slightly damp, I complied - it wouldn't do to scare customers unless they've actually paid cold, hard cash for a piece of plastic and fabric made by some 8 year old in Bangladesh - and directly before me, in all their redolent glory, were several masks. They had that new plastic smell - you know the one, when you've surreptitiously tried on a kid's mask and the temples pinch, and the nose doesn't fit so you can't breathe, and the lips and mouth hole are ridiculously ill-suited for anything but attempting unsuccessfully to whistle - that slightly carcinogenic aroma.

Of course there was Batman, that tortured soul, practically the patron saint of Halloween. Spiderman. Some tiaras for princesses. A stylized witch - as if the princesses I've met weren't far more sinister and unwelcoming than some of the really cool crones I've been fortunate enough to encounter. Frankenstein, who most people ignore ever since plastic surgeons make more money than God and, well, I live in Orange County, California, and some people here have year-round masks surgically attached.

That got me to thinking about masks, and a comment that HedgeWitch once made on one of my posts, about masks (and mirrors being "almost as fascinating"). Thanks for the ear-worm, Joy - it noodles around all the bleeping time. Mirrors? Masks? What a rabbit hole...

So this week's mini-challenge is to write about masks. It can be theme related to Halloween, or not. Heck, or mirrors, if that's preferable to you, but throw me a sop and include a mask reference if you do.

Here's a W.B. Yeats poem, The Mask, in the public domain, linked at the website Famous Poets and Poems. He's one of my favorites (The Second Coming helped establish my world view back in college, but that's a story for another day.)

The Mask by William Butler Yeats

'Put off that mask of burning gold
With emerald eyes.'
'O no, my dear, you make so bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise,
And yet not cold.'

'I would but find what's there to find,
Love or deceit.'
'It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what's behind.'

'But lest you are my enemy,
I must enquire.'
'O no, my dear, let all that be;
What matter, so there is but fire
In you, in me?'

And here's an excerpt from Charles Bukowski's poem, His Wife, The Painter, linked at Poetry Soup in its entirety.

About church: the trouble with a mask is it 
never changes.

Were I an academic and this were class, I might ask - so does it change? If so, how? Why or why not? But I'm not.

And of course, please post your poem in Mr. Linky, and please reference a link back in your post to the prompt here at IGWRT, and most certainly, please do visit your fellow mask bearers and wearers, leaving comments as you see fit. I've linked early so that y'all can have more time to weave your spells.

Thanks again to Kerry, our gracious host, for this opportunity.

- Michael, aka grapeling