An anaphora is a poem that repeats a word, a phrase, or a line/group of lines. This repetition emphasizes the theme of the poem, and often give the poem a driving beat. Here are my Anaphora poems:
Fencing Anthem
This is how you lose a war:
you seek stillness
you fold to all the card games inside your chest
you build up cold stone walls and let them close in
and compress all the air in you lungs
into silence.
you count seconds until timeless
you wait
you hate violence.
This is how you win honor:
you remember your liquid bones
and the quintessential fluidity
you employ when flowing from sitting
to standing
to flying through the air
a hundred errands on your mind
a million questions for your destination
you find that soul-organ Aristotle must have missed
and when you seek stillness
let it be for wisdom
only
you hear the spinal hiss of kissing blades
from sitting to standing to fighting
you count seconds as moment and wait
for only the right moment
to strike.
This is how you win a fight.
The Things People Fail to Mention
People don’t speak like this.
They don’t say:
that the sky was a science fair and the clouds of chipped mica
and overzealous glitter were being judged, that whoever left
the water on was ruining the pressure and the Earth shatters
molecularly when rain touches down.
People don’t dance with language.
They don’t say:
I beat my drums against my chest, where an echo already rests
when I chase immortality through necessarily stolen texts
stolen because what’s inside them is sacred and I’m a thief
through ghost streets when I haunt passages
and flaunt corridors filled with literary monsters
locked inside all the labyrinths that can be held
in one mind.
People don’t speak pure poetese
probably because even I’d think them crazy
before we compared finger tips, eyes, toes, and wings
and pens and notebooks,
and found that we are all only human.
People don’t speak like this,
but maybe humans do,
so when I write I always ask:
Aren’t I human,
and aren’t you human, too?