My Mother I dedicate these words for my mother— the one who gave me life and breath and love. She gave me language, and she's no other than my own human angel from above. Her care for me is limitless and pure. I learn the value of giving from her. When life is difficult, she is my cure. Her touch translates my pain into a blur. Now she is wrinkled, and her eyes are weak. She trembles, as she pours some tea for me. And as she coughs, and clears her throat to speak, I fear she'll sound older than old can be. The memory of my mother remains younger than her. I find her in my veins. 3 Consider the following descriptions of poetic forms: A villanelle is 19 lines long, but only uses two rhymes, while also repeating two lines throughout the poem. The first five stanzas are triplets, and the last stanza is a quatrain such that the rhyme scheme is as follows: "aba aba aba aba aba abaa." The tricky part is that the 1st and 3rd lines from the first stanza are alternately repeated so that the 1st line becomes the last line in the second stanza, and the 3rd line becomes the last line in the third stanza. The last two lines of the poem are lines 1 and 3 respectively, making a rhymed couplet. A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter with a carefully patterned rhyme scheme. The sestina is an old fixed form of poetry, dating as far back as the twelfth century. It consists of six six-line stanzas and a three-line concluding stanza. The ending words of the first stanza are repeated throughout each subsequent stanza in a set pattern. The same six words appear in the concluding three-line stanza, two in each line. A haiku uses no more than 17 syllables, arranging these often in lines of 5-7-5 syllables and avoiding similes and metaphors. Free verse is a style of poetry that is based on cadences that are more irregular than those of traditional poetic meter. While the basic rhythmic unit of most traditional poetic forms is the foot, free verse tends to use longer units, such as the line or stanza. Free verse may