I Depend on You Alone by Bob Metivier
Your weekly dose of fresh poetry #111 - a guest poem
I depend on you alone
You know my deepest secrets,
Accept the flaws that others find,
See through the mask that hides them.
You know my deepest secrets,
Shadows that I keep too close.
See through the mask that hides them,
The suffering the nights invoke.
Shadows that I keep too close
You share with me along the way,
The suffering the nights invoke
With no idea where I may go.
You share with me along the way,
Accept the flaws that others find.
With no idea where I may go,
I depend on you alone.
This week we’re doing something different. The poem above is written by poet Bob Metivier. We challenged each other to write a pantoum. I am publishing his poem, and he is publishing mine. This is what more he has to say about his poem and the process:
Pantoums are unusual poems. They can rhyme and can have meter, but it is not necessary. The form is defined by:
the 2nd and 4th lines of each stanza are repeated as the 1st and 3rd verses of the next stanza in a cyclical manner.
The idea of the poem is for new meaning to appear by the changing of context, punctuation, etc. until the final verse has a completely different meaning than the beginning.
In my poem above, it starts as an acknowledgement that this person is in a close relationship where he/she has learned that the other accepts them, flaws and all.
But as the poem progresses the darkness of the flaws express themselves, as well as the other’s engagement with sharing these flaws.
In the final stanza, the other is still walking along the way with this person, sharing in the experience. But this time the first person has no idea where he/she is going and completely depends on the other as a guide.
Thank you to Arjan for collaborating with me in this Pantoum Challenge and the cross-publication of our works. This is my first time doing something like this, so I'm completely dependent on his expertise and his kindness in taking on this project. I'm also very grateful for our connection made possible by Raffaella Ferretti, another gifted and selfless writer and editor.
This poem and the accompanying text is published with the permission of Robert G. Metivier, copyright © 2022, Robert G. Metivier. All Rights Reserved.
If you liked the poem, please consider buying Bob a coffee and subscribing to his newsletter:
Something to listen to
Our son is working on a writing project with his class, based on The Book of Hopes, a collection of stories, illustrations and poems for children. It’s an amazing project. Both the book and the one our son is working on in school. To inspire his friends, he wanted to bring a poem I wrote about him to school. It actually is also about hope. For this issue of #trpplffct, I recorded a version:
If you have a hopeful poem or short story, feel free to send it in via the comments or a reply. I’ll be happy to include it in upcoming issues. Or own book of hope and encouragement.
Now, for the original project, listen to (and watch) this video:
Poetry elsewhere
James is writing sonnets, American sonnets. And he has been here before. Also in the podcast. One thing I like about James’s poems is that there’s always one sentence that stays with me. Or phrase. My favourite? “a voice like grating nutmeg”. It actually got lost in a rewrite of the poem I saw it in first, but now this phrase is back. Read In the cut of a |crahk!|’d prince escorted:
I do like to watch sports and enjoy the great events. Not just to see who wins and loses, but also for the many stories behind what we see on tv. Dane Hammann has done an excellent job this summer capturing big cycling races in poems for derailleur. We, at least I, need more sports reporting like it. This issue of derailleur is about the final week of the Vuelta:
Sylvie creates poetry that helps her make sense of the world. And sometimes that means justifying how you deal with things, and why you don’t do that in a different way. That’s quite an extended way of saying what Sylvie writes in her poem Untitled 2” from her collection My Pharmacology.
That's an awesome new format, I also read your poem on Bob's Substack, super impressed!