EXERCISE 036: BEGIN WITH THE END

Cirrus whispering

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Anadiplosis is the rhetorical and poetic device in which words at the end of a line are in some way taken up at the beginning of the following line. You know, something like this:

The moon was severed by the cirrus,
The cirrus whispering like sickles through the night,
The night a coronation of distance:
Distance the empire, and the sorrow.

Write a poem of no more than twenty lines that uses anadiplosis, has four instances of end-rhyme, two birds you know the name of but couldn’t identify if you saw them, and some lyrics from a hymn.

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Notes from janan: I first encountered Anadiplosis in Zeina Hashem Beck’s work. Consider how skillfully she takes up this propulsive device in “Poem Beginning & Ending with my Birth.” In another poem, “Naming Things” Beck uses a modified form of anadiplosis, whereby a single word or idea from one stanza becomes the hinge to the next stanza.