Waiting in the Dark for Daybreak

A form of poetry that is new to me

Last spring I posted some articles about various forms of poetry: sonnets, haiku, mondo, golden shovel, and even Latin. I offered some examples of my own poems. (This was not my most popular series. Some might deem my efforts as “dabbling in doggerel.”)

My Substack friend Anna A. Friedrich at Monafolkspeak recently introduced me to “villanelle” poems. She has published some great ones, including a book, Under the Terebinth. Rabbit Room Poetry has restacked some of her poems as well.

A villanelle is a song-like poem, with a simple rhyme scheme and a repeated refrain. There are 19 lines with ending rhymes in only two sounds (ABA in each of five tercets, followed by a quatrain of ABAA). Lines 1 and 3 of the first stanza become alternating refrains in the following stanzas.

With her encouragement, I decided to try it out. I don’t consider myself a poet, but I enjoy experimenting with poems and understanding how they work.

During the season of Advent, we light candles on the four Sundays before Christmas, with the fifth—the Christ candle—on Christmas Day. The ceremony includes the reading of Scripture and other writings about Messiah. The tercets in my poem correspond to the lighting of the five candles.

Advent is a time of waiting and preparing for the coming of the Lord Jesus. We take the darkness seriously and lament the dangers that lurk in a broken world. We light candles in hope and anticipation of the promised light of the world. We cultivate a longing for everything to be made right. So it places a double emphasis on the first and second advents.

I wanted to see Advent and describe it through the eyes of a child. Here is what I saw.

Advent Candles

A Villanelle

A dark room with one flickering wick alight.

We huddle in this scary world of gloom,

Is it enough? When will we see full light?

Despair and hate and war with all their blight

Crowd toward our family table to consume.

But now we hope with two flickering wicks alight.

Hope’s dreams and faithful promise we recite

While candle three adds courage to the room.

Perhaps at last we will see truth’s full light.

“Thy Kingdom Come,” we plead with all our might.

Abyss and ugliness around us loom.

We wait, outnumbered, with our wicks alight.

One more now flames, for Christ’s will win the fight,

Though sighs and tears and sobs we may resume.

How long, we long, until we see full light?

The Day will come, for his and our delight.

He comes in love, our long-awaited groom.

We wisely keep our flickering wick alight.

It is enough. We live to see full light.