They're here!

Looking out my window one day last week, here's what I saw in my next-door neighbor's tree.

Big, big Robins, all puffed up weathering the "almost-spring" weather.

Well, we hope almost spring...

Do they know something that we don't?

There were at least ten of them in the tree...

So, this week's poetry homework assignment was to write a "pantoum".  The form is a Malayan one from the fifteenth century, with older roots in Chinese and Persian poetry.  The sound effect is close to chanting, with extensive use of repetition.  The second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the next stanza.  The pantoum circles back.  It ends where it began.  The last line of the poem repeats the first line.  The second line of the last stanza repeats the third line of stanza 1...and so on.  (Frances Mayes, The Discovery of Poetry) 

The Soldiers

 

I spotted the robins in my tree

There among the icy branches

In the midst of a snow-filled day

The harbingers of spring wait.

 

There among the icy branches

As the winter wind harshly blows

The harbingers of spring wait

Scouting ahead to herald the rest.

 

As the winter wind harshly blows

In the midst of a snow-filled day

Scouting ahead to herald the rest

I spotted the robins in my tree.

 

 

A.Schabes