Something free

 

Poetry – The Marsh                               FREE DOWNLOAD

Ten years we spent-my wife, our two children, our cats, and I-in a suburban house that backed onto a marsh. Although fifty miles from the Atlantic, it was a tidal marsh, and so it felt the influence of the sea.

It was a delight to me to be able to walk to the edge of my own property and venture out in a small canoe. The house was in a subdivision; the marsh was my escape. And regardless the state of the distant tides, there were the herons and the egrets ….

The form of this poetry is the cinquain, an American form of haiku verse comprising five lines of two, four, six, eight and two syllables respectively.

The Marsh comprises 90 cinquains arranged in sections designed to print out as 17 standard 8.5″ x 11″ pages.

This download is free with my best wishes. You are welcome to share it with others, provided that you do so in unaltered form, including copyright and URL found on the title page.

A sample:

Nature

never tires,

never fears to repeat,

never goes half‑hearted to her

routines.

Beyond

Abstractions of

Hours, days, weeks, months, years –

Yet rooted in them – our planet life

Goes on.

 

The sun.

The moon, the stars

Rise and set, charted or

Unnoticed. Astrological

Clockwork.

That kind of thing. Simple but not I hope simplistic.

More?

 

The long

Apprenticeship

Of souls-made-Indian

Taught them to live quietly with

The world.

 

Inner

lives and outer

they learned, living simply,

harboring no metaphysics,

no books.

 

We, though,

living modern

among appliances

and speculations, find no peace

within.

 

Our homes

are not silent,

our heads are never still.

As in computer games we play

our lives.

 

Somehow

there is some need

by Someone for beings

who can live like this, who can learn

this skill.

 

Never

knowing quiet,

never being rested,

living on the stretch, maybe we

are stretched.

 

Okay, that’ll do for a teaser. As with all else I do, of course, the sub-text is, “if I can do it, you can do it too.”

 

 

 

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