Here's the "underwater" poem. To put it in context: There's a story called "
The Distance of the Moon" by Italo Calvino, and I really like it. In that story, there is a song that the characters sing, but only one stanza of it is written out. I took it upon myself as a challenge to write a poem that included that stanza, and that contained themes of the story. Well, I succeeded, though I owe the success of getting the themes down to the fact that they're already woven into the stanza, so it would have been pretty hard to write a poem around it and avoid the themes. Anyway, enough talking, here's the poem, in all its trochaic glory:
Here, the fisherman - with patience - baiting
fish below the ice of cold December,
shivers softly in the snow,
but his thoughts are elsewhere as he's waiting
- in the cold, the warmth of love remembered -
while the fish swim down below,
and he - as on loves afar he's doting
pitying the lonely one who's sought them -
sees them as they seem to be:
Every shiny fish is floating, floating;
and every dark fish is at the bottom,
at the bottom of the sea. . .
(The last stanza is the one taken from the story, if you're wondering)