Pleiades

Before I get to the poetry, I'd like to mention that Tuesday was the Let's Talk Blogfest. If anyone wants to see my offering, you can find it HERE. There's also a link so you can check out the rest of the participants - all 112 of them!

This week's Passion For Poetry is the poetry form of Pleiades.



The Pleiades is a cluster of seven stars visible in the night time sky. The Greeks saw this cluster and named the stars after the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. According to myth, Orion the hunter was in love with the sisters and chased after them until the gods took them to safety, transforming them first into swans, and then into stars.

The Pleiades poem is has seven lines and each line starts with the first letter of the poem’s title. This form was created by Craig Tigerman, Lead Editor of Sol Magazine, in 1999.

Although Hortensia Anderson, a popular haiku and tanka poet, added her
own requirement of restricting the line length to six syllables, there is no set syllable count or rhyme scheme for the pleiades poetic format.

This was an interesting form to write in. It looks deceptively simple, but I confess I had a dictionary close at hand to look up words that started with the appropriate letter.


Wizardry
Whiskey coloured sunrise
Warping the landscape;
White mist snakes along the ground,
Writhing among the trees.
Wolves howl in the East,
Woeful in their song;
Weeping fills the silence.


Quagmire
Quarreling voices shatter the calm,
Quibbling over trivialities.
Quixotic impulses,
Quaint in origin,
Quelled by habit,
Quicken with impulse -
Quota fulfilled.