Incremental Poetry ~ 41 Lines

Lost

seafoam
curls around
a band of gold
that holds
a pure white stone,
a distant relative
of the million
grains of sand
which couched its fall
when it was cast aside;
with every pass
it comes to be
yet more
a new part
of the sea.

relentless waves
erase
two sets
of footprints,
denying their memory,
though
pounded
deep
by hot emotion.

waves roar,
gulls cry
as if
to mock the
weeping
of the lovers,
as if
to drown the
voices
of their hate,
as if
to bring to naught
the knot
that would have bound them—
if only they could have heard
the voices, perhaps they would not be
lost

Copyright © 2019 Abigail Gronway – All Rights Reserved

Welcome to my series, Incremental Poetry, where each week the featured poem will be one line longer than the one I share the week before. I have no idea how long I’ll keep this up, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Thank you for stopping by.

Scansion:
Dinggedicht or Object Poem
A genre of poetry in which communication of mood or thought is made through acute observation of things and symbolic concentration.
Introduced in the early 1900s by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke while studying impressionist paintings.
Dinggedicht appears to observe man-made articles while the imagist tends to observe natural surroundings.
Line length, meter, rhythm, rhyme at the discretion of the poet

While the sky is the limit with this form, 41 lines does seem a bit long, especially compared to examples that I found. However, that is where I am in my series, and I had an extremely hard time trying to decide which form to use for my 41-liner. In fact, I thought I was going to have to fall back on free verse. 🙂 Okay, technically, this is free verse, but with other restrictions applied.