“Some days, some hours, we soar.
Hawks, eagles, miles above sea level, worshiping the splendor below.
The wind lashing around us, we are boundless…complete…
Other times we bleed – dreadful children,
scraping our way through a field of shattered glass and dreams.
Yet we carry on, feigning normalcy;
actors, playing the part assigned to us by the others,
All the while perishing.
All the while feeling as if we’re unique to desperation.
Can no one feel the tears?
Can no one see our heartbreak?
Has no one the same perception of hopelessness we possess?
Hanging in the eternal balance,
somewhere between life and death,
We watch the years tick-tick-tick by,
soul gradually unburdening itself from skeleton,
ever so gently, as mortality snakes in.
Frantic, we grasp the nearest olive branch,
be it friend or foe,
cleaving to any veneer of chance.
As water sashays through our fingers, though, we frightfully…
It takes some thought but once you start a simple plot can become art in the confines of seven lines and rhyme sublime
Ha’sonnet
Ha’sonnets are a short form of poetry invented in the RhymeZone poetry site by poets MHenry and Grant Hayes in May of 2016. They were created in the comments section for the poet Suz-zen’s wonderful poem ‘Farewell, Farewell,’ where Grant Hayes and MHenry discussed what to call four syllable line poems. This led to the additional constraints on the poem creating the Ha’Sonnet form.
Being short poetry makes the form best for describing vignettes, little moments of life, or the thoughts that pop into your head. It also lends itself to lighter, more humorous topics, though that is not a limitation.
Ha’sonnet Description
Ha’sonnets are roughly half of an Elizabethan style sonnet, and follow some of those sonnet rules in how they are created. They consist of seven lines of four syllables each. The first four lines set up the poem like the first two stanzas of a sonnet. The fifth and sixth line contain a little turn, or volta, preferably unexpected, like the third stanza of a sonnet. And the seventh line a resolution, or turn, like the final couplet of a sonnet.
For MHenry and Grant Hayes rhyme was optional, but if used the end rhyme scheme tended (but is not limited to) to be a b a b c c dd with the seventh line (dd) rhyming on the second and fourth syllable. MHenry added a four syllable title rule suggestion later. Rhyming ones in the scheme described are easier for me, and I find them quite fun to write.
Ha’sonnets were originally planned to be short form, single stanza poems, but sometimes I’ve created poems with multiple ha’sonnet stanzas (see the first blog post), or connected multiple ha’sonnet poems with a common theme into what could be a single longer poem.
To sum it up, to be considered a ha’sonnet the minimum requirements would be the syllable and line counts, the volta and the turn; the rhyme scheme is an extra level of challenge
