❤️❤️🫂❤️❤️

#TSOTD_note The Imperial War: Third Battle

- a grim poem

- for those keeping count of Xau's guards: seven not nine ride into battle with Xau, because 1. Atun is dead. 2. Leong, though this is not stated in the text, is working with Memnor's surgeons to triage and treat the wounded.

✏️📖🐉

#TSOTD_note Taunting Fate

Never his queen,
never the only one he bedded,
but the one he'd befriended, his Rose.

- this is the last time Rose is named

- but she's mentioned later in Convergence "both bringing a woman with them"

- just as the first time we met her, she's accompanying Donal to war

#TSOTD_note When King Xau Was Gone

- first published in Uppagus

- drew on a poem of mine, "I Will Not," published in Ship of Fools in 2005, which begins:

I will not think of you fondly
when you are far away.

I will not burn my breakfast toast
because I saw your photo on the wall

✏️📖🐉

#TSOTD_note Between Battles

- first published in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly

New griefs layered
over old ones.

- life, if you live long enough

- but there are also new joys layered over old ones, e.g. seeing parenthood from the other side

- also, this poem shows that Feng became a king's guard

✏️📖

#TSOTD_note Tenth Lesson

- the second of Keng's lessons with the dragon that we see. The reader is left to imagine the missing lessons

- this one is meant partly as light relief between darker poems

- but, also, dragon! I am fond of this dragon

✏️📖🐉

Yay!!! Many congratulations on your lovely glasswork! Amazing! It very much does NOT look like the work of a beginner. Lovely.

❤️🐉❤️

#TSOTD_note Pyre

- the much longer first draft began:

Later,
a bard would add a coda
to his battle song:

The flames' high leap,
smoke rising toward stars.
The dead arrayed in armored glory
on the funeral pyre.
Warriors ringed round,
raising an anthem
to fallen heroes.

Lies. They did not sing....

I've picked All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy to read next, but let it be noted that I was enjoying Mouse and Dragon (Sharon Lee + Steve Miller) more. I am saving it to read when my daughter is home. McCarthy for now. I love the way he writes, which is hardly an original thought.

Round 1 complete. Round 2 will be delayed by dinner and other such frivolities. The four entries for round 2 are:

P.S. These are a midquel, taking place in the middle of the existing work :-)

#TSOTD_note Gul

- from the point of view of Gul, the Imperial Envoy's "pretty boy" mentioned in the previous poem

- another very dark poem, this one with light mixed in

A tenderness, a gentleness,
certain as daybreak,
sure as an anchor,
calling Gul home.

- echoes "The Demon's Crew" from earlier

Sounds like the cats did a fine job this morning in their capacity as sleep assistants.

All well here. It's a Saturday and therefore not a writing day, but I wrote because I wanted to and had a Good Time (left to some nebulous future point, the question of whether it will be fun for readers).

Snippet! Thank you for the snippet! :-)

The Glass Project looks good to me!

Ah, cat disagreements, a very physical affair. When I had two cats, one (always the same one) would sometimes attack his brother. Fur was shed.

The injustice of it all....

#TSOTD_note Journal

- one of the few poems in the book written in first-person, a journal entry from an unnamed soldier

New orders from His Imperial Envoy:
we're not to talk about who's dead, how many.

- ah, censorship

yelling,
bowels hanging out of him
like a giant worm.

- war is not pretty

✏️

#TSOTD_note Collaboration

One hundred and fourteen men.
No women. Complicit, corrupt.

- I wrote this poem in 2016

- then and now, I am riled both by those who actively do Bad Things and by those merely (!) complicit in the Bad Things

✏️📖🐉