Royalty
"I ask you, sister, tell me true:
What is this place below?
It seems to set my heart askew,
And yet I know it not."
"Recall, my sister, long ago,
The wretched night we fought?
I keep these ruins here to show
Another way I failed."
"Again with this? And here I thought
That ship had finally sailed.
The fault was mine; it never ought
To stain your pearly wings."
"A pearl? Behold it, chipped and paled!
Attend the songs it sings
As bards in olden days regaled
Their masters' filthy ears!"
"Forget it, Sunny. Scary things
Have danced with me for years.
You'll need to shout with louder stings
To make me break a sweat."
"This sand, so drenched with blood and tears,
Declares my endless debt:
Accounts forever in arrears
I never can repay."
"Okay, I'm sensing you're upset.
I see a lovely bay,
But if there's ghosts I haven't met,
An introduction, please."
"A hundred stalwart ponies, they
Arrived upon the breeze
With friendship, but they lost the way.
I didn't intervene."
***
"Forgive me, sister, if I sneeze.
Or do you truly mean
You sought to take their destinies,
Controlling all they did?"
"I watched them play each sordid scene
And never sought to rid
Their hearts of darkness, didn't preen
Their feathers, and they died."
"Again, I really hope you kid
Because you just implied
You wished you'd kept a tighter lid
And stopped them living free."
"I could've shown them, could've tried
A million ways or three!
But no. With callous sloth, I sighed
And left them to their doom."
"Perhaps you watched attentively
The pattern on your loom
That threatened mass destruction: me!
Eternal night and all?"
"Excuses make a sorry broom.
I simply dropped the ball.
In pride, I let myself assume
My will was strong enough."
"I think you're trying to appall
With all this tyrant stuff.
You have to know you can't install
Your brain in others' heads!"
"A teacher must be stern and tough,
Instructing though she dreads
The distance this creates, the rough
Allegiance based in fear."
***
"Our happy little quadrupeds
Have always loved you, dear.
So tell me straight. These shattered sheds:
Your fault exactly how?"
"A pony, friendless and austere
Whose mind would disallow
Another's joy, went to her bier
By drowning all alone."
"Uh-huh. And this provoked a row,
Disturbed the cornerstone,
And sank the town? Come off it, now:
A simple accident—"
"They don't exist! I've always known
The word 'coincident'
Is used in ways too overblown!
If only I'd prepared!"
"Prepared? For what? You truly meant—?
Oh, Sunny, now I'm scared.
Because you're trying to repent
Of things that aren't a crime!"
"And should I ask you how you dared
Rebuke me when your mime,
Your Tantabus, lies deeply laired
Within your darkest dreams?"
"You know? You can't! It's not—! But I'm—!
It isn't what it seems!
I face my constant inner grime
So I won't fall again!"
"We think alike, our self-esteems
One trackless, stinking fen.
Our subjects marvel at our gleams,
But we see only lies."
***
"I start to understand it, then.
They haunt you with their cries,
The ones who died, succumbing when
I forced you to react."
"Suspicious growling, stifled sighs:
It's love and trust they lacked.
Instead of neighbors, seeing spies,
They panicked when she drowned."
"Another mark on me, in fact,
For if you hadn't found
Distraction—keeping me intact—
You could've focused more."
"I love you, Starry. Spread around
The blame? Why, that's the core
Of what I'd call some truly sound
Relationship advice!"
"And yet I slam my mental door
On matters less than nice
To let them fester, rank and sore.
As guidance? Not the best."
"I choose displays. They're neat, concise,
And stab me in the chest:
My failures, plain and packed in ice,
Museum quality."
"We're quite the pair, alive with zest
To breathe such misery
That we can never truly rest.
And yes, I love you, too."
"Aloft, then, sister! Out to sea!
We've so much more to view!
Defeats! Mistakes! A panoply
Of things you need to know!"
Celestia tells Luna:
That, even though Peridot's death a thousand years ago was an accident, Celestia has always blamed herself for it. Luna insists that she should take the blame since she was the one distracting Celestia way back then, and they agree to share the blame. So that's kind of an answer, I guess.
But using a fixed form like this in a free verse contest? That should be a technical foul, shouldn't it?
Mike
This poem bothered the heck out of me. It had a clear rhyming scheme, but the rhyme scheme ended up bothering me a lot because it was a cross-stanza rhyme scheme. The stanzas are natural breaks in the poem, but instead, the rhyming draws the various parts together in a weird way, and it felt tremendously jarring. The rhymes themselves were actually great, and the poem had a solid cadence to it, but…
Ugh. I really wanted to like this a lot more than I did, and having Luna and Celestia talk to each other and complete each others’ rhymes in this way felt unnatural.
Also, I felt like, while this answered one question, it didn’t really use the other threads in the pattern very well.
So this one doesn't do much to explain the goings-on...
... but sweet Celestia that structure is amazing. Even in the best of poems there's usually at least one hiccup in the rhythm: some tiny forgiveable little half-syllable you just skip over because hey, this stuff's hard, man. And yet this thing is smooth as ice, and keeps it going for the whole of its impressive length.
And the apparently-stilted rhyme scheme has a mad kind of fun to it: reading it is like sprinting down a steep rocky slope and trying not to faceplant.
All in all fabulous.
This one was very fun to read! Lovely structure and the conversation between Luna and Celestia is endearing and, while not exactly joyful, is somewhere between happy and bittersweet. However, these qualities don't make for a particularly powerful ending to horizon's story - imagine the mood whiplash from finishing Sunspot's chapter and reading this immediately after. That, coupled with the fact that it doesn't really explain the mysteries of Myinnkyun, prevent me from viewing this too favorably.
Excellent rhyming though!
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I've never been:
Any good with mystery stories. Half the time, even after the detective has set the whole thing out in the last chapter, I still can't quite figure out how it all hangs together. So to be honest, I didn't even notice all the other mysteries going on in the original story: I just saw Peridot go into the drink and refused to believe that it was murder.
Then when Horizon announced this contest, I figured I'd focus on the one character who would feel the most responsible for Peridot's death: Princess Celestia. She'd be taking Luna on a tour, showing her all the mistakes she'd made while Luna was away. Luna would, of course, try to take responsibility for the whole Pony Island situation, and they'd agree to share the blame.
As for the form, the interlocking thing is to show how close the sisters are. It's not that they finish each other's sentences: it's that they incorporate each other's rhyme schemes. And I wanted to make it as formal as possible to show that, with Luna's return, harmony is once again restored, rhyme and reason reign supreme, and all that nasty free verse is a thing of the past.
I'll be posting this as the 30th piece in my collection Ponyville & Other Poems as soon as the results are announced, too.
Mike
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What I said (that didn't get reprinted) was:
I read this thing, or tried to, at least three or four different times. My brain refused to focus on the words. Dealing with it was a phenomenal struggle. Every time I let my concentration wander even a little, I started looking at the rhythm and the interlocking rhyme scheme again. And it loops around perfectly—of course it loops around perfectly, because how could you possibly not do that.
I honestly don't have the faintest idea what you wrote here. Like, at all. None of it registered. I couldn't tell if the voicing made sense. I could hardly tell who the characters were. I spent the whole damn time just staring in awe at the poetry of it, and then screaming at the other judges on Skype that one of the contestants broke my brain and I didn't know what was going on anymore.
So here, the story goes that Peridot drowned by accident, and the ponies of Myinnkyun tore themselves apart in fear and distrust, each worried about their own secrets coming to light and being linked to her death by the others. Yeah, in this case I could see Celestia blaming herself for the whole mess.
Wicked rhyme scheme, too!
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Thanks, folks:
Though, again, I'm sorry about the brain-breaking. Kipling once said that, after a while, writing "fourteeners" like this got to be as natural to him as breathing. I'm not quite there yet, but I fear I'm well on my way!
Mike