It is Ours to Dance...

Poetic Bloomings challenges us to write a villanelle

The villanelle is 19-line poem consisting of 5 tercets and a final quatrain. It requires no set meter, nor number of syllables per line. It carries a pattern of only two rhyme sounds (ABA in 5 tercets, and then ABAA in final quatrain). The first and third lines of the first tercet repeat alternately as a refrain closing the succeeding stanzas, and rejoin as the final couplet of the quatrain.

A Villanelle

We cannot choose our sunshine or our rain

Its fusion orchestrated by love’s most perfect Hand

It is ours to dance; lest heaven plays its melody in vain

To crave a minuet of past refrain

Is but to miss the chorus He has planned

We cannot choose our sunshine or our rain

He tunes Time’s dulcimer; its temporal strain

Touched by One whose thought we cannot understand

It is ours to dance; lest heaven’s plays its melody in vain

Now high, now low, the harmony of pleasure and of pain

Sweeps soulfully across the sea and land

We cannot choose our sunshine or our rain

It is not ours to object His choice refrain

The Maestro of life’s orchestra directs His precious band

It is ours to dance lest heaven plays its melody in vain

Too soon the music fades from earthbound plain

It is not ours to know the why or understand

We cannot choose our sunshine or our rain

It is ours to dance; lest heaven plays its melody in vain

© Janet Martin