The sparrow darting above is not mirroring but mocking;
each light flap of its wings has me gawking.
The scratch on the tree, I’ve seen it before. The clouds
repeat themselves. To where have I been walking?
I wait by a mound of dirt, beg for carrots, contemplate
suicide and chat. I hope one day Godot will come knocking.
You won’t leave me alone, like days or thirst; like graves—
always prowling with red eyes in the grass, stalking.
Chatter blends like drops of blood in water or darkness at night.
Deep in the forest are the sounds of indistinct talking.
Alex Deng is a writer based in Toronto. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Temz Review, Ricepaper Magazine, Pinhole Poetry, La Piccioletta Barca, Reverie, and periodicities. Find him on Instagram @allexdeng.
Questions and Answers
Do you use any resources that a young poet would find useful (e.g. books, films, art, websites, etc.)?
I think interviews and prose in literary magazines have taught me the most about poetic craft and theory. There are obvious ones, like the Poetry Foundation, but seeking out smaller ones in the cities I stay in, Toronto and Peterborough, has given me perspectives of poets who are writing right now, in the climate and place I live in, and I don’t think I could have found these anywhere else.
What poetic techniques did you use in this poem? How much attention do you pay to form and metre?
This poem is a ghazal, which follows a certain amount of rules: It has to be written in standalone couplets which can all act as their own poem; I followed this rule. In the “truest” form of the ghazal, the second line of the couplet has an internal rhyme (qafia) with a refrain (radif) at the end of the line; I did not follow this rule; instead, I replaced the internal rhyme and refrain with an end rhyme. There’s also a self call-out at the end of the poem; I did not do this. There’s also a theme that the ghazal is meant to touch on, which is both unrequited love and fate, where the poet calls out to someone in the poem, and it is not certain whether it is god or their lover. I did not do this. I tried to follow a syllabic meter in this poem, not an accentual one, whereas the “true” ghazal focuses on both. With all that said, I called this the “Freedom Ghazal” for a reason, due to the form’s, what I find, constraining nature.