Eight-line Poems 2

Curlew

Curlew

There’s a reason they talk of the curlew’s call
in broad flat sea marshes in the mists of dawn
where the cold lingers in muddy backwaters
and the soul can be alone as never before.

It’s a sound that speaks of vast emptiness
that wraps us in the fog of separation from kin
and calls forth a spectre of bleak nostalgia
so much more than Hepburn’s “The loons, the loons.”


Line count: 8
Free verse
For Express It In Eight, 03.23.24
Prompt: Choose a word or two from one of the three poems and write a poem around it. I chose the word “curlew” from Longfellow’s The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls.