Harvest Mouse

It weighs as little as a silver coin,
a harvest mouse enriched with russet gold,
concealed in the tall piles of harvest grass,
where once the meadow and the wheat field joined.

Its nest is filled with berries it purloined,
with autumn nuts, and ears of wheat and chaff.
The harvester retrieves it with his hand —
it weighs as little as a silver coin.

When ploughed in autumn, wheat fields will rejoin,
all uniform in brown with furrows straight.
The harvest mouse will in its nest remain;
it hibernates until the spring’s first sign.

It weighs as little as a silver coin,
all curled up in a ball inside its nest,
where once the meadow and the wheat field joined.

Kim M. Russell, 19th September 2024

Image by Glen Cooper on Unsplash

It’s Thursday, and Grace is our host for the dVerse Poets Pub’s Meeting the Bar, with a new poetry form, the villonnet, recently created by D. Allen Jenkins. It’s a hybrid of the villanelle and the sonnet, with the iambic pentameter of both, while the structure is the four-stanza/line of the sonnet, with the two-line rhyme nature of the villanelle. The final stanza replaces the sonnet’s couplet with a typical villanelle tercet.

In essence, the villonet is a poem of 15 lines, made up of 3 quatrains followed by a tercet, in iambic pentameter. It is rhymed and either keep the two rhymes of the villanelle or eliminates the second rhyme of the villanelle and rhymes only the anterior lines of the stanzas. Line1 is repeated as lines 8 and 13, and line 4 is repeated as lines 12 and 15.

Tricky – especially when labelled like this: A¹bbA² abbA¹ abbA² A¹bA² or A¹xxA² axxA¹ axxA² A¹xA² x being unrhymed, or A¹bbA² accA¹ addA² A¹bA².    

26 thoughts on “Harvest Mouse”

  1. How fitting for the harvest season to pen about the harvest mouse. Love the russet gold color and the nest filled with berries and nuts and ears of wheat and chaff. A tricky form but you aced it Kim. Have a wonderful day (or night)!

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  9. A beautiful poem of harvesting for the season to come. Here I see squirrels scampering to gather the black walnuts. It’s amazing how they crack these open and run away with their prize.

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