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Good Little Fishes
A Prose Poem by Sam Grackle
The school of fishes in this tiny stream are learning to be good little fishes and everyone said there was nothing to do on this island park nearby but there is. We know it. We walked and talked and looked at what there was to see. Much life. I picked a flower for her to hold as we followed the path. Then we gazed upon nature’s design — fishes only seen after they dart around and make ripples in the surface of the water. She said the flower, a yellow and bright orange, smelled nice and then set it down gently at the end of the trail before we hopped out of timelessness.
This one is more personal. I tried to capture the tone of this recent event in my life. It’s light and matter-of-fact. There is a bit of a narrative to this one as is expected from the prose poem form, but since it’s still a poem, I tried to use some imagery and symbols to heighten the meaning and emotional aspect of the piece.
In case you are wondering, prose poems have been around for a few hundred years already though they are still relatively unknown. A lot of people consider them a mixture of forms and rather difficult to work with. One poet who really added to the history of this form was Charles Baudelaire, a French poet. His prose poems are dark and mysterious, and he started writing them as a way of rebelling against France’s stale poetic forms.
Thank you for reading.
Original Content via Sam Grackle. All Rights Reserved.
