My nights are glimmers, like the stars
I almost see behind the haze
of misted air—reflected dark–
a shadow of what?  I cannot say

for certain what bewitched my mind
and held it captive in the sky
outside my window—its edges shine
like invisible wings that silent, fly

between the fragments of absent dreams,
beyond the capacity of words–
I sail on sheet-tossed restless seas
awaiting dawn–the songs of birds

Laura at dVerse asked us to write an alternate rhyme poem–3 stanzas of 4 lines each–borrowing alternate rhyme pairs from a published poem and using them in the order in which they appeared in the original poem. A cursory look provided no inspiration from other poets, so I looked at the sonnets I had written and found three that were appropriately rhymed.

I chose the first 12 lines from my sonnet “Purple Dreams”–itself inspired by the song lyrics of Prince–because how could I resist a final word list that began with stars and ended in birds?