Hello Friends — and Happy Birthday to Dara, who I love because she helps me ask questions like this:
IS LOVE
Midwives and winding sheets
know birthing is hard
and dying is mean
and living's a trial in between.
Why do we journey, muttering
like rumors among the stars?
Is a dimension lost?
Is it love?
"Is Love" by Maya Angelou, from her 1990 collection I Shall Not Be Moved, can be considered a ballad. But notice that as Angelou descends into lost, the ballad form breaks down: the meter becomes more irregular, the rhyme more imperfect.
The ballad form was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 25, 2011, or you can read more about ballads on www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.
Cheers,
Ellen
Labels: NPM