Travel in 3 parts

Heidelberg Adagio ma non Troppo in 3/6
Miletus      Allegro Vivace in 4/17
Lübeck     Allegretto un Piu Grave in 3/12

Heidelberg

Heidelberg's cold, stone, red-
orange Renaissance and

Baroque bulwarks barri-
cade cobble-stoned alleyways

with one year's memory.
At dusk, houses light

up with internal glow which
one by one the Nightwood

Wanderer beckons.
Who whom wittened by

his/her neglected trail
of filth and folly

hearkens to where they're
called by name, Matthew/Robin.

Miletus

Much-enduring Miletus,
situated near the town of
Selçuk, thrice of 4000 years,
a bustling, prolific metropolis.

By such odyssey now free from
Society's pressure to "succeed",
"look good", have a "nice" personality.

Dances with Artemis, daughter
of Zeus of the aegis, with her
skirts wide open, toppled ruins
carelessly filling Aydin's lap's valley.

Sings with gray-eyed Athene by
hollowed reeds and bleating sheep through
secret corridors thrown wide open.

Ah, but much-enduring Miletus
has been betrayed, whose Northern gate
to the Southern agora lays
manacled in Berlin's museum Pergamum!

Lübeck

When dawn's rosy fingers
on Lübeck's Hafen
to the maiden disclosed,
she required no Muse,

the fable to enfold.
On Id so loudly,
satisfaction refused
could be not,

clamors big bread the for,
or in a hand stroke that
private place she forsook.
Holding surprising form

the sculpture heads of Ernst
Barlach fragmenting,
exteriorizing
the house of Thomas Mann.

Cathedral evoking
instant of light and peace
procures Gotthard Kühl.
She speculates the

ensuing goal:   would God
be real if she were
to develop her soul?

Christy Bergman,
February 1998

Notes on the Meter:
Being a mathematician, I write poetry with an idea and a base beat in mind, similar to the way I play music. So, being new to poetry, I intuitively approached it similar to music.

In English language poetry, the basic measure is an iamb consisting of an accent-nonaccent pair, "te-TUM". The meter is determined by how many iambs there are per line, iambic tetrameter = 4 iambs, iambic pentameter = 5 iambs, etc. The other structural element in poetry is the stanza or number of lines that are grouped together.

In music, a measure has a given number of counts, the size of those counts determined by some metric. For example, 6/8 time means there are 6 counts per measure with a 1/8th note equalling 1 count or 1/6th of the measure. Putting this together, results in beats. So 6/8 time actually has 2 beats per measure, 3 counts per beat or 3-1/8 notes per beat.

For me the following parallels followed: Syllables are notes. (Thinking of syllables as notes presented me with an interested dilemma when I tried writing haikus later. Japanese is a syllabic language, each syllable pronounced equally, but English is accentual syllabic, the base measure being an iamb. This means Japanese meters having 5 or 7 syllables per line sound natural in Japanese, but a nice-sounding English phrase would have an even number of syllables corresponding to some number of iambs.) A line is a measure. A beat is how many iambs. So, a poem written in 3/6 would have 3 counts per line with 1/6th "note" equalling a count or 1/3 of the line resulting in 3 beats per line (or iambic trimeter in poetry parlance).

But how many lines to make the stanza? Poetic stanzas tend to be more rigid than music stanzas (groups of 4 lines in poetry is common; whereas a musical stanza can be any section of music to be repeated). I decided to make mine end when the number of beats represented as a numerator over the denominator in the time measure representation would equal 1 if interpreted as a fraction. I.e. a poem written in 3/6 time should be iambic trimeter with 6 iambs per stanza or 2 lines per stanza.

When I wrote this in 1998, I intended:

Part I, Heidelberg; in 3/6 music time; is poem form trimeter with 2 lines per stanza.
Part II, Miletus; in 4/17 music time; is poem form 3 lines of tetrameter followed by 1 line pentameter per stanza. Note stanzas 2 and 4 are only 13 and 12 iambs respectively. I put more space between the stanzas to represent the pauses or 4 and 5 count rests respectively.
Part III, Lübeck; in 3/12 music time; is poem form trimeter with 4 lines per stanza. At the end, there's a 3 count pause.

Notes on the Syntax:
In Part III, I wrote this poem thinking back on what it was like trying to appreciate art in a foreign country, in a foreign language, while cold and hungry. For stanzas 2-3, I took 3 5-word phrases and jumbled them: 15243, 14532, 15234. It just felt better. Compare the feeling when reading the stanzas compared to their prose alternates:
Satisfaction couldn't not be refused. It clamours for the big bread or a hand stroke in ...