I may incorporate this one into a story, or use it as a template for one...or both. It's vaugely 'fantasy' in tone, with hints of a near-Herbertian fascination with the desert. Ack, I'll just let you read the excerpt and draw your own conclusions.
----------------------------------------------------------------
"Gauntlet"
Under the feet and beating heat
Of Helion's might and heaven's light
Lie coarsened hands of shifting sands,
Whose barest touch makes heroes hush.
Whose embrace stone, and tree, and bone--
All forged and shod by man or God--
Cannot long bear with hide nor hair,
Or leaf without a refuge stout.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Simple? Yes. Mediocre? Probably. But it's not meant to be long or complex...just to communicate specific imagery to the reader.
So? Any thoughts?
Inkwell
------------------
"The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp."
-Anonymous
I don't claim to be a poetry expert, but this works all right for me.
"Whose embrace stone, and tree, and bone cannot long bear...without a refuge stout."
Can you see it? If I put 'Who' instead of 'Whose' there it wouldn't make structural sense, and I haven't been able to come up with something else that fits the rhyme scheme.
Inkwell
------------------
"The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp."
-Anonymous
Your beats are thrown off by "Whose embrace stone..." which wants to read, because of the first stanza "whose EMbrace STONE..." (caps for stresses) But it doesn't make sense when read aloud, because the natural stress in the word "embrace" is on the second syllable. The rest of the stanza struggles to get back to the easy meter of the first, but suffers because the first line already made the reader slip.
The second line of the second stanza is confusing, until you get to the third and fourth lines. I think some rearrangement would help.
I can definitely see this fitting really well into a fantasy work.
I'm no fan of the stuff, so taking that into account and that I'm not familiar with the rules of poetic license, I'll add my agreement to the confusion of "Whose embrace stone,"
After stumbling there, an re-reading it a bit, I thought it seemed readable with "Whose embrace, stone," though maybe that was just because I figured it out. Even then while I think it flows for readability, I'm lost about "whose embrace" and the subsequent nouns (stone, tree, bone). What is a stone/tree/bone embrace? I'm confused (which is the standard result poetry has on me).
I ask because the rhyming is so pronounced, I had to read it several times to get the meaning of the poem. The first time all I picked up on were the rhymes, and the second time I just stumbled over the wording.
My feeling is that if you need it to rhyme, because of the context for example, then that's fine, but in my mind, rhyming poetry makes me think of ye olde poets of yore
Also, when I read rhyming poetry, as I said, the rhyme can often dominate, especially so in short lines and with such prominent and heavy use. I get into a cadence, and almost start to chant the poem.
I'm wondering if Kathleen will mind my posting a revision, since none of the 13 line-related rules mention poetry. This being a short piece, it fits in its entirety into an 11 line fiction framework (14 shorter 'half lines' of poetry). I think I recall others posting flash fiction that was complete in less than 13 lines, so I'll just go ahead and trim something later if Kathleen says so (or, more likely, she'll do the trimming and unintentionally make me feel guilty).
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Under the feet and beating heat
Of Helion’s might and heaven’s light
Lie coarsened hands of shifting sands,
Whose barest touch makes heroes hush.
The strongest fail where they prevail;
In endless black these hands attack
With winds’ embrace, and fast encase
All flesh below in clouds of woe.
They scour bare the hide of hair
As Man and beast become a feast,
Then disappear with wordless leer
At foolish pride, now cast aside.
Thus bleached remains the Gauntlet gains…
Sad omens of a desert’s pains.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Better? Worse? Perhaps it's something in-between. As I said, poetry has never been my forte (which makes this experiment all the more challenging).
Inkwell
-----------------
"The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp."
-Anonymous
However, I got confused yet again in the second stanza. "The strongest fail where they prevail;" who's they? After I read it the second time, I knew that you meant the sands, but the problem was that I had to reread it. The desert is singular, and that's the antagonist I had in mind. When you said they, I was wondering who else was attacking the heroes.
Would this be clearer? I'm basically rearranging lines and playing with the wording.
---------------------------
With endless black these hands attack;
Fell winds encase in their embrace
The strongest soul, and swallow whole
All flesh below with clouds of woe.
---------------------------
Inkwell
-----------------
"The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp."
-Anonymous
The thing is, I can't imagine for a moment that this poem is from antiquity. I'm too used to the fact that when you translate a poem, you must choose between preserving the exact semantics of the original and following a lyric scheme.
Not that it's impossible, particularly if you use several key words from the original language to make the rhyme work. Of course, that depends on those words having some meaning to a modern reader. But with your verse, I get the impression that the words are chosen, not for their exact fidelity to the original meanings, but for the simple face that they happen to rhyme in English.
Every single line makes it impossible for me to believe the poem was originally written in some other language, or at least to believe that this poem is remotely faithful to the meaning of the original. You also need to consider that rhyming in English is both more difficult and more noticible than in most other languages that are less etymologically and phonetically diverse. Because English is a mishmash of words borrowed from hundreds of other languages, this isn't surprising. But it does mean that we normally don't end up rhyming a lot when we speak naturally. In most other languages, making your sentiment rhyme isn't a great accomplishment that takes any particular effort, often the language structure forces sentances with similar modes to sound somewhat similar in the first place.
Now, it isn't impossible that an "ancient" civilization would have developed from a culture that spoke a mongrel language like ours, or even that the language would have successfully resisted the inevitable efforts of priests and scholars to force it into a set structure (grammarians have been fighting a losing battle with English for a couple of hundred years now, I don't see the situation turning around). But if you reveal that information to the reader, you want to do it on your own terms. This poem is just too impossible to imagine as the natural result of translation from an ancient tongue.
Ugh.
It almost sounds like something Yoda would say if he'd been a character in The Odyssey. Not that I'm saying it's up to Homer's standards (perhaps Homer Simpson's)...the whole point is, it's obviously not.
Ah, well. I'll have to think on it some more.
*Strikes 'Le Penseur' Pose*
Inkwell
-----------------
"The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp."
-Anonymous
If you are creating a fantasy world, does it have to be a given assumption that English would not be the native language? Further, if English is not part of the world you create, then everything you write and everything your characters say is translation. But you don't necessarily want it to LOOK like translation, because that's hard to read.
So songs and poems should look like songs and poems...including meter and rhyme, because those devices were hallmarks of early poetry. (Have you read Isaac Asimov's editorial "Poetry" on the Asimov's website?)
Otherwise, I wouldn't. The poem you've written isn't bad or anything, it just doesn't seem to have any place in the story you described. There are lots of good examples of ancient poetry reliably translated into English. You should go to those sources rather than imitating poetry that was originally written in English.
It's up to you, but I'd like to see a completely convincing and original (okay, maybe not completely original) invention of poetry for your culture. Did ancient Egyptians have a poetic tradition? Perhaps you could borrow from their near neighbors to find some conventions that will ring true.
-----------
Wellington