Poem A Day, 016

Poem A Day, Day 16

For today’s prompt, write an elegy. An elegy doesn’t have specific formal rules. Rather, it’s a poem for someone who has died. In fact, elegies are defined as “love poems for the dead” in John Drury’s The Poetry Dictionary. Of course, we’re all poets here, which means everything can be bent. So yes, it’s perfectly fine if you take this another direction–for instance, I once wrote an elegy for card catalogs. Have at it!

Channeling my inner Poe, four interlocking haikus:

Elegy

Violet velvet

curtains brush aside, reveals

naught but a dead bird

caged within a cage

bleached white bars interwoven

with raven black hair

long ago she slept

while the angels sang her name

eternal prison

and I, the warden,

will watch over her repose

never will she fly