So I’m celebrating the imminent release (this week, they say) of Magic U book 4 (“The Poet and the Prophecy“) and over the weekend I ran an “extra credit” assignment — anyone who wrote me a poem about love, magic, or preferably both, would get their choice of either Magic U book 1 or Spellbinding (the Magic U short story anthology). And my favorite would win a signed paperback of book 1 or the whole Magic U ebook set.
However, I’m having trouble picking a favorite because the poems are all AWESOME. (If you’re wondering why poetry, poetry is one of the major magical skills one can study at my magical university.)
So help me choose a winner? I’ve installed a “polls” widget below. Please vote for your favorite of the choices below! I think I got everyone collected together from all my various journals and emails…
Choose a winner from these five awesome poems on love and magic:
(Voting form at the bottom…)
A Villanelle by Roz Kaveny:
Love is the spell that changes everything
It makes us better or it makes us worse
whether we’re beggar girl or soldier king.
It writes the songs that all musicians sing
and sits beside their chair when they rehearse
Love is the spell that changes everything.
To do without it was to forge the ring
that wrecked the world – the Nibelung’s bleak curse.
Whether we’re beggar girl or soldier king
It fans our sleep with its all-caring wing.
And for the dying it’s the kindest nurse
Love is the spell that changes everything
It is our greatest joy and suffering
It is the source of all our greatest verse
whether we’re beggar girl of soldier king
villain’s destruction, pure saint’s hallowing
It rocks our cradle and it pulls our hearse
Love is the spell that changes everything
whether we’re beggar girl or soldier king.
A Haiku by Yasuhime:
The magic of love
Can be studied a lifetime
Yet never mastered.
Free-form Acrostic by Cecile Grey (no relation, LOL)
Miles spill out in front of me. They spell out
A drawling landscape of “what if”. But isn’t it
Graduated animal impulse, this needy alliance: Love?
Isn’t it just the slurred edge of an instinct. Or is it
Conjured possibility. Human idiosyncrasy. Magic maybe.
Sonnet by TedddyWolf
Will we go raking all the autumn leaves?
The lawn you love is buried underneath,
Or shall a spell that some enchanter weaves
Bespell them all into a fallen wreath?
The neighbors lawn is cleared and oddly green,
Without a leaf among the many trees.
Yet so maintained it is an eerie scene,
As nothing blows upon the gentle breeze.
Our neighbors have forgotten being young,
The magic of a child in the yard.
Our piles full of dampened leaves have clung,
Until we, holding hands, jump in them hard.
Our autumn is a precious time for fun.
The spell of time with you is never done.
TeddyWolf also did a redux in haiku form:
Fallen Autumn leaves
Now ensorcelled in a pile
Hold my hand and jump!
Free verse from JumpupHigh:
“Making You Laugh in Public”
You let me straddle your lap
When we are in inappropriate places
You speak to me in French
Then don’t tell me what it means
You let me kiss you when I am drunk
And bite you on the shoulder
You play with me in my city
Before going home alone
You visit me in my dreams
So that I won’t ever forget you
This is who we are
And who we always will be
I know it’s hard to choose, so you can pick up to TWO to vote for!
[poll id=”2″]
Poems About Magic and Love from readers
I just put a comment on the LiveJournal mirror of this post before coming over to WordPress:
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I see an endlessly spinning wheel and “Loading…” below “view results” and above “Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com”. (WinXP+SP3, Firefox 6.0.2) Is that, possibly, something that your eponymous domain blog exports that LiveJournal can’t import correctly?
—–
That seems to be the case. Here I can see the poll results; on LJ I can’t.
Hm, yeah, it’s probably something that doesn’t translate over. I could make the cut force people here instead of being a regular lj-cut, instead…
I had the same issue.
I’m intrigued that my additional choice was not the one that most people picked.
Yeah, it’s funny that it’ll display the poll on other sites but not record the votes. FWIW, on my browser it was clear my vote wasn’t recorded when I tried to vote from LJ.