New Poem: An Empty Glass

For quite awhile now I have been meaning to write a rondeau, which is a traditional French poetic form.  Perhaps the most famous rondeau, and one of my personal favorites, is Paul Lawrence Dunbar's We Wear the Mask, which I included below.  Mine is nowhere near as good as that, but I thought it turned out pretty well.

We Wear the Mask

by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask! 

An Empty Glass

An empty glass leaves rings just so

To mark a place that cannot grow,

There just beneath a window sill,

Repeating endlessly until

Grief encircles one loose shadow.

In books we too would often go

To places that we didn't know

And in so doing hoped to fill

An empty glass.

We read apart tonight although

A gust of youthful wind might blow

Back unturned pages and thus spill

Memories we never made, still

Circled on the calendar below

An empty glass.