Heartbeat of America ~ Cadralor ~ American Sentence

/ Ken Gierke / rivrvlogr

Heartbeat of America

A well-oiled machine does not have to mean a well-oiled environment.

As a citizen of this great land, it’s your right to dig your own grave.

Opposites may attract, but not so much when they’re at each other’s throats.

The intent to bring harm upon others is not an oath worth keeping.

The heartbeat of America is sadly in need of CPR.

The prompt at Meet the Bar with the Cadralor + Nobel Prize, hosted by Björn at dVerse ~ Poets Pub is to write a Cadralor, a poetry form co-created by Lori Howe, Christopher Cadra and Mary Carroll-Hackett. The rules of the form, as stated at Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor:

“The Cadralor is a poem of 5, unrelated, numbered stanzaic images, each of which can stand alone as a poem, is fewer than 10 lines, and ideally constrains all stanzas to the same number of lines. Imagery is crucial to cadralore: each stanza should be a whole, imagist poem, almost like a scene from a film, or a photograph. The fifth stanza acts as the crucible, alchemically pulling the unrelated stanzas together into a love poem. By “love poem,” we mean that your fifth stanza illuminates a gleaming thread that runs obliquely through the unrelated stanzas and answers the compelling question: “For what do you yearn?”

My poem probably is shorter than expected, and I suppose I’ve stood the form on its head by using an American Sentence for each of the stanzas.

Image (layered): surefirecpr.com & vectorstock.com

45 thoughts on “Heartbeat of America ~ Cadralor ~ American Sentence”

  6. Impossible to argue with, Ken. The patient needs quadruple bypass to open the channels of humility, kindness, empathy, and I’m not sure what else. Angioplasty purge is needed. The deadly plaque needs to be dissolved. Maybe a transplant would be easier? You are courageous to tell it like it is. Using American Sentences and the Chevrolet slogan are clever choices to get the message across.

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  18. This satisfies so many of the poets inside me– a clever approach to the forms, the successful use of a difficult form (the American sentence), the word use so that you feel “poem”, and a topic that needs addressing.

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