Day 29

Fox-gazelle

A ghazal (pronounced more like guzzle) is a persian form with some very persnickety fans. Done properly it is a marvel of engineering. We will not try to write one of those.

We will, instead, write some couplets. Five, maybe eight couplets. Two-line poems.

The only rule is to keep the two lines close to the same length. 

Oh, and have a line break at the end of the first line, even if it’s just an unpunctuated pause. 

The one ghazal-specific thing we are going to do is to make each of our couplets about something different. 

Oh, and to tie things together, let’s let the second lines of your couplets have a word or phrase in common.

[“Uh-huh” maybe, or “hamburger.” Well, maybe not hamburger. It can be very simple and very common, though. “Understand?” “Of course” “I knew you would” “I see” “snap”]. Because we aren’t writing ghazals that repeated element doesn’t need to be at the end of the line or anything obvious. 

Just a little thread running through. You’ll probably see something in the first couplet that just begs to be repeated in a new context.

Really, nothing onerous. A Fox-gazelle.