Incremental Poetry ~ 67 Lines

Lost Twice

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 prints,
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 rage,
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.

one
set of footprints
continues on
alone.
two other feet
remain anchored
where they stand,
mindless of the sand that eddies and erases
this fresh trail almost as quickly as it’s being laid down,
eyes fixed on the one
creating the marks, as both printer and print
fade into the horizon,
waiting,
hoping
the trail of footprints
will circle back
like the seagulls flying to and fro.

where once two pairs of prints
found their way into the sand,
fresh marks appear, then stop.
a shadow grows
and furrows form where last was seen
the gilded band,
but sand’s distant relative is
forever
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

It’s funny that when I wrote my first Dinggedicht, I thought 41 lines was quite long. Now I’ve written 67 lines, and I’m satisfied that the story has been told in its entirety. Perhaps you wouldn’t notice if I didn’t tell you, but I took the original poem, “Lost,” and added to it, so as to tell the rest of the story. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had already used this form in my Incremental Series. Oops! I was trying to use a unique form for every poem. Oh, well. Time is short, and I do not have the leisure of trying to find another form that works for 67 lines and then write another poem. It is what it is. I wanted to give this one a happy ending, but it wasn’t there. I suppose in the case of this couple, it wasn’t meant to be. I’d love to hear your thoughts.