Bonus Points Whirlpool (a terza rima)

I started out with a blank canvas
My quest was bonus points galore
Scribbling an epic tale as big as Kansas

You can’t buy bonus points at the store
They are bestowed on us quite randomly
But they don’t count for much anymore

They’re like a golden sunset certainly
I just need enough to live happily ever after
I would give all extras to my family

But an epic tale is not the answer
Words are swirling in this terza rima
Just trying my best to avoid disaster

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Linked to Linda Kruschke’s Terza Rima with Paint Chips Challenge. The challenge for this prompt is to write a terza rima of at least three stanzas. If you want to write an epic poem in this form, you will get a lifetime supply of bonus points, but it’s certainly not expected. (And some of you have so many bonus points by now that you don’t need more, especially since you may have realized you can’t do much with them.)

In keeping with the theme of three, I would like you to use at least three of these paint chip words and phrases: blank canvas, lavender, whirlpool, seedling, happily ever after, golden, and cliff’s edge. I would also like you to use one of them as the title of your poem without actually using it in the poem itself.

——

TERZA RIMA (tare’-tsuh ree’-muh; Italian, “third rhyme”) Tercets with an interwoven rhyme scheme, invented by Dante Alighieri for The Divine Comedy: aba bcb cdc ded efe fgf, etc. The poem (or individual section, called a canto by Dante) usually ends with a single line or a couplet, rhyming with the previous tercet’s middle line. But it may also end with a tercet, it’s middle line rhyming with the opening tercet’s first and third lines, making the form circular.

When Dante settled on this interlocking form for his religious epic, he had the Trinity in mind: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. A kind of Roman Catholic numerology pervades the poem, with its “three-fold” arrangement of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Geoffrey Chaucer introduced terza rima into English with sixteen lines embedded in section III of “A Complaint to His Lady,” most of which is written in other forms. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” is the best known English poem in terza rima, but he also used the form for “Prince Athanase” and “The Triumph of Life.” . . .the poetry dictionary, pg 317.