#NaPoWriMo Day 3: Purposefully Far Away.

Today’s prompt via napowrimo.net is a little challenging.

The prompt is inspired by a Spanish form of poetry called the ‘glosa’, which is a poem that glosses over, or explains, or responds to another poem. The challenge is to take a quatrain from a poem we like, and explain or respond to each line in the quatrain with a 10-line stanza where the last line is the line from the quatrain itself. This has, no doubt, been one of the toughest NaPoWriMo prompts I’ve attempted, and it has been so much fun!

The poem I’ve chosen is ‘Life in a Love‘ by Robert Browning, and I hope I have done justice to it. While you’re here, please go check out my friends’ pages: Kittu’s Modern Mixtape and Amour Infini. Once again, this year, I’m doing NaPoWriMo with these amazing people, and I would love for you to go check out their poems too!

Happy reading! Xx

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I’ve looked for you far and wide,
The love of my life,
My darling,
The apple of my eye,
But you’re never here;
I can be your Venus
Rising from the sea,
But all I do is beg, and beg, and beg,
For a single glance you’d spare me;
My life is a fault at last, I fear:

I did set too much store
By your empty promises,
What a shame it was,
What pitiful fate,
Such shame on me, indeed!
But a little birdie told me
You’ve been asking around,
All over town,
So strange I’m nowhere to be found–
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!

If winning you over
Was the highest peak I’d scale,
Consider my corpse
Frozen and buried away
In some unmarked grave no eye shall see,
And in that grave,
I shall take with me,
All of your countless memories–
Traces and marks I try to erase;
Though I do my best, I shall scarce succeed.

There shall come a day
When you fade away
Like the last of the season’s frost–
A mere speck I can’t shake
In a myriad of all I hold dear;
I wonder if I ask too much of me,
To let go of you,
And all that I knew–
My purpose to get away from you, from here,
But what if I fail of my purpose here?

~© Shubhangi Srinivasan.

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Featured Image by Ravi Roshan on Unsplash