Hello everyone! In my Creative Writing II class, we were recently promted to write a villanelle poem. Now for someone like me who is not the biggest fan of poetry, this seemed like a scary task at first, but I quickly learned that I could have fun writing poetry as well! If you don’t already know, (which I did not) a villanelle is a poem that follows a very strict structure with 19 lines, 5 trecets and a quatrain at the end. It also has an ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA format meaning that all the last word in all the A lines has to rhyme, and the last word in all the B lines has to rhyme. I definetly felt like I was in over my head, but after coming up with the couplet that would eventually be used in every stanza of my poem, the rest flowed out onto my paper easily.
To get the inspiration for my couplet, I looked into my soul and tried to find something deep that I can intwine into the lines that would become my villanelle. After a few minutes of soul searching, I realized that maybe what I was looking for was right in front of me. And then it came to me.
If you know me at all, you are very aware that my favorite color is yellow, my favorite season is summer and my favorite city is Los Angeles. And sitting here in Illinois in the middle of winter, it can be difficult to remember what the sun even looks like sometimes. So I thought, why not write a poem about my long lost friend the sun and the joy that it brings to my life?
The Brightness of the Sun
By: Alaina Frazier
Let the sunshine in your life thrive
From the second it peaks its bright, beaming head out,
For it keeps the fire in your soul alive.
When your fears arrive,
And seem to consume you all throughout,
Let the sunshine in your life thrive.
Give it the space to survive,
Provide it the room to swim about,
For it keeps the fire in your soul alive.
Even when you feel like you’re struggling to survive,
Never let the consuming darkness defeat you in a knockout,
Let the sunshine in your life thrive.
Let the brightness take over and drive,
Drive you to success you cannot doubt
For it keeps the fire in your soul alive.
So keep up that jive,
And your constant flow of joy will never produce a drought.
Let the sunshine in your life thrive,
For it keeps the fire in your soul alive.
While writing this, I saw the sun peaking out between each yellow letter that I wrote. The individual letters were each their own unique color, but together, they made up the most beautiful color in the world to me, and the one that it had been too long since I had seen.
While reading the other villanelles that were written in my class, I couldn’t help but notice the main theme throughout all of them which was darkness and overall gloom. While I thought about doing something like this at first, I realized that what I needed was a little pop of sunshine on that day. And it made me smile when I saw that other people said that it brought them that same sunshine while reading.
So, if you’re reading this, I hope you take away a little bit more sunshine for your day, and for your life. Although sometimes I feel like many people think that the best writing has to have an element of drama and darkness, sometimes it’s best to just defeat that darkness. Let the sunshine win for once. It will make you and your readers happy. 😊
-Alaina
Writing in Full Color 