Read Write Poem Prompt #105 was a Wordle. I used some of the words and some synonyms for some of the words, but I didn’t use all of the words. For instance, wind shows up as breath and sigh. Meteors became falling stars, pulled became hoisting. Backs morphed onto backpackers. The only thing left of the trees is their fallen fruit. and the stars are only implied by the sky. The moon led me to minaret. You get the idea.
The Resting Step
Backpackers don’t neglect the tiny rest that lies
between two steps, a rest the space of a breath.
In that moment, they gain strength from shells
that pierce and mosses that curl around stone.
They taught me that the way to climb was not
by hoisting myself up, but by setting one foot
before me and straightening my leg, moving
forward and upward with a syncopated sway.
Near the top of this hill lies, almost like a sigh,
a clearing with a view of the water, the bridges,
the minarets, where once in spring orchids flared
like falling stars, and once in autumn silent crows
feasted on the fallen fruit before lifting skyward,
and in between the two, a point of abiding rest.
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I also learned how to walk this way with a backpack, and I know the difference it makes. Your description is perfect. I love where you take that in the next stanza. Elegant and beautiful.
Hi Tamra,
I’m not a backpacker; seems far too strenuous! But I can appreciate the view in your second stanza; beautiful musicality, words and imagery. I particularly like “orchids flared/like falling stars”
Even hiking in the woods without a backpack, one needs a place to sit and ponder from time to time. I enjoyed the imagery, “spring orchids flared like falling stars” and “mosses that curl around stone”. Thank you for sharing this restful outing, Tamra!
A beautiful vista of a poem (and more). “the tiny rest that lies between two steps, a rest the space of a breath”, a nearly microscopic observation, yet immense when all added up.
I once was amazed to observe the difference in whole sense between a breath out and a breath in. Yet you go to a step beneath a breath, ever so brief. Amazing stuff!
And so much of the world is implied, possible, as you expand the analogy broader in the second stanza. Near so quietly arrived as might be easily missed. “orchids flared like falling stars” and “silent crows feasted”, are two wonderful images.
Thanks for this poem Tamra!
nicely done..i love backpacking…..whether its here in the mountains…or down in Cuba….tis alllll good…thanks for this
As in a sonnet (that this poem resembles), a stanza break (or turn) occurs after the octet — a kind of rest before the sestet. The second stanza is just so very evocative, filled with images so pregnant with literary or historical associations that they assume the gravity of symbols or allegory: a hill, a clearing, water, towers (minarets), orchids, fallen fruit, crows lifting skyward. The stanza to me seems about recovered personal memory, or the historical Golden Age of a homeland, or some kind of death that happened between the “once” spring and the “once” autumn. It’s very powerful, whatever its origin.