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.”
wonderful
Frank,
I simply love it…the concept, form and message.