Using form: Semi-formal: RHL, ‘Hunting’

The Osprey splashes, misses, and flies by
skimming the waves, rising, five yards away.
What’s its success rate? Does it care?
The Stingray searches, gliding, mouth to sand
five yards beyond the shallows where I stand.
Its Roomba-work’s its own affair.
The water splishes, burbles random rhythms.
The sun confuses, over-hot, then hidden.
The Oystercatcher calls. The Osprey rocks
on its branch in a casuarina,
flaps down-beach to another.
Along the margins of the shore, alone, each stalks.
They hunt for food
and I hunt them for what they mean, or could.

*****

There are elements of the sonnet about this semi-formal poem: it’s in iambics (though with uneven lengths of line); it has rhyme (though some only slant rhyme, and not patterned); it has 14 lines and a final couplet (though not with a clear volta where you would hope, after the 8th line). But I think the disjointed nature of the poem, its stop-and-go lines of different length, is suitable for the nature of the hunt: the searching, the sudden swoop, the pause, the restarting. In that sense the form is appropriate for the subject matter, and therefore good. It may be that I was too lazy to beat the whole thing into pentameters with a regular rhyme scheme… but it may also be that this was the right place to stop for this particular poem.

‘Hunting’ was originally published in Obsessed With Pipework, and has just been reprinted in Green Ink Poetry (motto: “We Welcome Chaos, Calamity, And The Natural World. Hope Punks & Witches” in their current collection with the theme of ‘Forage’.

Photo: “Osprey” by Mick Thompson1 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.