In My Grief A Crab

Grief is a tangled mess,
a knot of ghosts and memories,
its sting is in life’s unevents:
a hermit crab without a shell
moving in to plastic and metal
trash; a honey bee poisoned by pesticide;
a wildflower wilting in heat by a roadside.

Kim M. Russell, 8th July 2024

Image by Mark Harpur on Unsplash

It’s the second Monday in July, and the first prompt at the dVerse Poets Pub after the summer break is the Quadrille, a poem of exactly 44 words (excluding the title), which can be written in any style, rhymed or unrhymed, and includes a word supplied by the dVerse host who, today, is Merril.

Congratulations to Merril and her husband on recently celebrating their 46th wedding anniversary. She tells us that it was a beautiful day, a few hours of which they spent on the beach. She says that they saw crabs of different sizes scurrying across the sand and dropping into holes as they approached.

Which is why today’s word is crab – and Merril has even found poems with the word ‘crab’ in them, for example ‘Especially When the October Wind’ by my old favourite, Dylan Thomas, ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti, and Mary Oliver’s ‘The Hermit Crab’.

So, we are writing poems of exactly 44 words, including the word crab, or some form of the word—crabby, crabapple, crabbing, etc.

52 thoughts on “In My Grief A Crab”

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