Rising Sun

In dawn’s quietude
the rising sun is a full stop on the horizon,
a sizzle from red to orange, rude
in its nakedness, all the while rising
into a still slumbering sky.
Its light is concentrated in one place,
a gold reflection like a cat’s eye,
shimmering across the Earth’s face.

A rusty vixen trots from behind a tree,
the sunlight burnishing her fur.
She grips a bloody bundle between her teeth,
feathers bristling like a flower head or burr.
She hastens home to feed her young,
the cubs she left in in her cozy den.

She hears the shot, the echoing bang–
the cubs will not see their mother again.

Kim M. Russell, 9^th April 2025

On Day Nine of NaPoWriMo, the featured resource is the online gallery of the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. I was really drawn to the rising sun quilt. The optional prompt for the day is focused on poetry offering us a way to play with and experience sound: “through meter, rhyme, varying line lengths, assonance, alliteration, and other techniques that call attention not just to the meaning of words, but the way they echo and resonate against each other”.

The poem shared as an example of some of these sound devices in action is Robert Hillyer’s poem, ‘Fog’, which “uses both rhyme and uneven line lengths to create a slow, off-kilter rhythm that heightens the poem’s overall ominousness”.

Our challenge is to write poems that use rhyme, but without adhering to specific line lengths. For extra credit, we should reference a very specific sound, like the buoy in Hillyer’s poem.