Author's note: This poem is based loosely on a Japanses poetry form that preceded the Haiku, the Renga. A Renga is originally a collaborative poem, with one poet creating the first stanza, then another the second, back to the first, and so on and so forth. The poet is supposed to base the stanza she writes on only the one preceding hers. It follows a 3-line, 17-syllable pattern, followed by a 2-line, 7-syllable pattern, and repeats, generally for approximately 36 lines. Imagery is usually based around nature, love, etc.
I wrote this Renga on my own, and it breaks form a bit at the end, so it is obviously not traditional. It can be read as a sort of monologue, with the 2-line stanzas being another person's commentary on the 1st speaker's thoughts. I imagine it a sealonging-aflicted Legolas as the primary speaker and a dear friend—perhaps Gimli or my OC Ithildim—filling the spaces between (though it is, of course, open to interpretation).
And with that explanation of the form aside, here is the poem.
How Summer Is Now
Here, the summers open with screaming; the trees are shaken
of the sea and its anger. Anyone can smell it, but me? I am cut open
from the inside, laid out like a fish, pickling in its salt and brine.
What comes with the winds is worst—
a ragged tumble and chase.
The sea and I tear paths: it dumps all of itself in this land before
the mountains and turns my forest upside-down. Engulfed, the rivers
become currents instead; they swirl me away in boats of debris, leaves.
Uncontrollable and sick
with want; drunk on it all—
Colors roil, tumble, are born from the maelstrom of my heart cleaved open.
Everything speeds past with the rivers' turns, and I cannot be caught:
I have tried to catch myself, but I am upside-down, and I miss.
Everyone, a holey net;
every season, a prayer.
Have you ever asked the sky for forgiveness, or the wind for mercy?
In the spring, I sing to gentle rain; I ease myself into the season.
Fresh and sweet, dirtied with new life, I apologize least in the spring.
But salted breaths breathe out, in-
sensate, begging clemency.
Still, floods do not forgive, and I drown in it, and I ask to be saved.
Only the sea hears—I am touseled hair and wet wings; brown with summer
and wrinkled with dew, and I smell of—and smell—only the sunken woods.
Adrift in a sea of trees,
solid and unforgiving.
My tenth summer here approaches, and I have asked everyone to be
anchors; to stop my body from weaving through the trees, smashing on rocks.
Every year it is the same—with the wind, I hurt myself, and others.
It is a beautiful fall, though—
dancing and erratic.
I find the rhythm of the trees and sea's pulse so early now, cloistered
even as I am in a room cut off from the stars—I try so hard,
but still: I resurface ever more often thigh-deep in the real sea.
It stings, lifts the mind above
reality and drops it.
I hurt, and yet I crave.
Next year, I will go north, or somewhere dry. Alone, I will wander until I am free
of the summer, until the next season, the next storm, from this prison
I made for myself in coming to this place—the trees are shaken.
I run—I am a memory
flickering and embodied.