Falling Apart

The year has started to fall
apart.

Pointillistic bursting
of nuts and fruit.

Later, leaves
crunching underfoot.

Conker shells split,
release shiny mahogany kernels.

Oaks shed acorns
that hit hard ground with a crack.

It’s still warm enough for white butterflies.
Craneflies crowd windows or hang

in corners
from spindly alien legs.

Cooler mornings reveal cobwebs,
dewdropped now –
frosted soon.

Kim M. Russell, 3^rd September 2026

This Thursday Grace is our host for Meeting the Bar at the dVerse Poets Pub, with an (un)poetry form for all. She says that “with change in the air, this month we’re exploring the descort, a medieval French poetic tradition built around the idea of discord”.

Grace explains that “the descort is not defined by a fixed pattern of lines, rhyme, or meter. Instead, it is a poem of deliberate difference.” She has provided an example, a poem by Taylor Graham entitled ‘The Mother Lode’.

Our challenge is to write a descort, experimenting with, for example: varying line lengths; changing rhythms or meters; inconsistent rhyme schemes; different stanza shapes; shifts in voice or perspective; fragments alongside complete sentences; the use of another language; or dialect or unusual visual arrangements on the page.

We don’t need to use all of these techniques but should keep in mind this principle:  Let the discord mean something. Rather than creating chaos for its own sake, we should allow variations in the poem’s form to echo, resist, intensify, or embody the subject matter.