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At our last MTB, Björn gave us the challenge of the Via Negativa poetry form and coming across Averill Curdy’s “Sparrow Trapped in the Airport” I was taken with how the first half of the poem is written in that same vein with Never rather than Not as the defining adverb

...never the gods’ favored glamour, never 
the pelagic messenger bearing orchards 
in its beak, never allegory, not wisdom 
or valor or cunning, much less hunger
...lentil brown, uncounted, overlooked
in the clamorous public of the flock” [more]

It’s a wonderful description of the sparrow in both what it is not and what it is. Personally I have a soft spot for these understated birds especially since in more recent years they’ve left our metropolis in droves, after aeons of being so common that ‘Cockney Sparrow’ became an epithet for born Londoners. Now I too have left and followed them North where they flock in my garden. But in Deborah Digges’ “Vesper Sparrows” they still frequent the city:

“...Fear needs its metaphors. 
I’ve read small helplessnesses make us maternal. 

Even the sparrows feel it,
nesting this evening in traffic lights. 

They must have remembered, long enough to mate, 
woods they’ve never seen, 

but woods inbred up the long light of instinct, 
the streaked siennas of a forest floor 

born now into the city,
the oak umbers, and the white tuft 

of tail feathers like a milkweed meadow...”[more]

And with this first MTB of February 2025 we are turning to an invented stanzaic form created by Kathrine Sparrow that she calls a variation of the Swap Quatrain. It was first prompted by Grace in 2022 namely the Sparrowlet:-

Poetry Rules:

  • A stanza of 6 lines – any number of stanzas permitted
  • 8 syllables per line
  • end rhyme scheme BbabaA (often written in iambic tetrameter.)
  • L1 and L6 of each stanza is written in 2 hemistichs i.e the line split in two, with commas
  • The 2 halves of L1 are inverted but repeated exactly as a refrain in L6.

For example:
L1 In winter’s cold, as moonlight beams
L6 as moonlight beams, in winter’s cold.

N.B. The 2 halves of L1 contain and set the a and b rhymes thus:
RRRA, RRRB
xxxxxxxb
xxxxxxxa
xxxxxxxb
xxxxxxxa
RRRB, RRRA

Some of our poets that wrote to Grace’s prompt provide good examples for clarification:
Paul Vincent Cannon ~ The Dogs
Ron Rowland ~ Navigating This Thing we call Life

So once you have posted your poem according to the guidelines above, do add it to Mr Linky below then go visiting and reading other contributors as that is half the fun of our dVerse gatherings.

[N.B. Mr Linky closes Saturday 3 p.m. EST]