ludic verbosity for the win
TEASE my PLUM Pudding DRYLY with BASIL.
Basil, my plump one, teases dryly with wit and
a kind of plump humour, dry Lycra-garbed Basil. Tea’s
‘ere, Bas. I’ll plump pillows for you, teasely dry you.
[When the brain can’t behave itself.]
PLUMP young Gregory, eight years old, not yet the hollow cheeked Nyssa, as on icons–
DRYLY his older brother asks: “Surely you will not jump in again?”
BASIL, older brother, not yet the Great, as in history,
TEASEs lovingly. Today: two young brothers, an idle afternoon, playing on a river’s bank.
Later, two fathers, Cappadocian, cold waters of the Halys long since dried off.
Note: I’m imagining Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa as young brothers, in their hometown of Caesarea of Cappadocia–now Kayseri in Turkey–spending an afternoon on what was then called the river Halys in Greek.
More from Wikipedia:
SWAMI never one for tradition or
DOGMA, more inclined to
SIEVE out the bits he’s not
BOUND to follow.
SWAM I in the emptying
SIEVE till that household hound, the
DOG, MAde a noise, then found
I was down the plughole BOUND.
SWAMI grows uneasy: to transcend Samsara seems assumed,
DOGMA of a kind, but he wonders if desire itself forms the
SIEVE in which knowledge ebbs away, leaving only Avidya, or whether we are
BOUND, chained, not by desire itself, but by desire’s end.
TURBO, as he called himself, would
STRAY into the cool kids’ arcade,
FRILLed leather jacket and aviators,
CLOWN in their eyes, hero in his.
TURBO, this if your third appearance; first time, I did
STRAY, redirect you to TURBOt, mispelled fish. Second time, forgoing
FRILL, I invoked your sense of speed. Perhaps, next occasion, I won’t
CLOWN, and wield you for an engine, if poesy can there be found. Perhaps.
Note: I tagged this with a tag, “meta”, which can be used to point at Quordle poems that go meta (i.e. they speak to mechanisms or the history of DQP itself–reflecting on the act of using words in a Quordle poem, say, or on the process of participating in DQP). The tag can be browsed at https://dailyquordlepoem.com/tag/meta/. Also, there is a “tag cloud” at the bottom of DQP’s web pages. The size of a tag shows you how often a tag has been used. This is what it currently looks like:
We pronounced his name GAZER – he was Gaza Fraknovari, a
Hungarian boy whose family had escaped the revolution.
He had to find a way to LUNGE into the Kiwi-English all around him
Tongued by schoolboys careless of whether he could speak or understand it.
Unlike Audras Kuzma, who spoke BADLY, and never learned to speak
Better, Gaza’s mind was quick; in adult life he took a degree and passed
Easily. The mind of one GAUDY with the colours of the English language, the
Other, still fluent in his native language, lost in the language of his new country.
[Partly true, partly not. And totally out of the normal DQP format. Sorry!]
Bawdy
GAZER stunned by taser made
GAUDY dancer’s
LUNGE go
BADLY…sadly.
BADLY managed temper, faulty sense of pride–now a duel to fight.
LUNGE of epee mistimed, opponent ready with counter, and then: so little time left.
GAUDY seems the world with its colors as sight is ebbing,
GAZER laid out, looks up at trees and clouds, the last impression. Takes one more breath, his last.
Note: I guess this balances out the hilarity of Steven’s poem. Not that that was my intention.