They closed the mill the year I turned nineteen.For eighty years it had told the town the time —the seven whistle, noon, the half-five out —so that we set our clocks not by the sunbut by the men who set their lives by it.When it went quiet, something in the airthat we had never noticed being therewas suddenly, enormously, not there.The birds came back. That was the strange part. Birdsyou couldn't hear before, all down the row,as though the town had been too loud to sing inand no one told the birds until the end.My father stood in the yard the first whole morningand listened to a blackbird like a manreceiving news he wasn't sure was good.He'd given it his hands, his back, his hearing.It gave him, at the end, a bird. He wept.I never told a soul. I'm telling you.
About blank verseUnrhymed lines in iambic pentameter, steady in rhythm but free of rhyme.
Blank verse has no rhyme, but it keeps a beat: usually ten syllables a line, falling into five pairs, each pair a light stress then a heavier one. Because nothing chimes at the line ends, it can sound close to natural speech.
The shape Unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter: five pairs of syllables, each unstressed then stressed.
Listen for A steady da-DUM pulse, five beats a line, and no rhymes at the ends.
3 poems in this form →@saoirse
Elegies for things that don't usually get one: a coat, an answering machine, a mill.
6 poems · 7 readings received · 9 written · 4 followers
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