Today I return to poetry. This was an unintended poetry practice. I was shuffling through my horde of photos looking for one to use with the prose poetry I’ve been experimenting with lately and realized I had a lot of photos showing a forest path. This set my mind down a path (heh) of green leaves, filtered sunlight, and picturesque wooden bridges and staircases, and I revisited places like Sica Hollow State Park in South Dakota and Wildcat Den State Park in Iowa. The result was the rather unimaginatively named “Forest Path”.

When I initially started jotting my ideas down, I thought I’d go for a slightly longer prose poetry piece than I’ve been doing, but when things started to rhyme I switched gears. I tried to write each thought as a sentence before I split it up into lines to maintain a little of the original intent. I didn’t use a standard rhyme scheme, but I did manage to maintain a consistent one. I also didn’t stick to a standard meter. Since I was starting with sentences, I let things flow naturally, which rarely results in the same number of syllables in each line with the exact same stress pattern.

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I did, however, pay attention to my syllables and stresses. Writing this poem came fairly easily this time, so I was more or less pleased with the initial result. As I edited, deliberating between words like shaft, beam, and ray and debating whether to include “winding” or not, I would refer to my stress markings on the related lines. If one of the words I was considering brought the current line’s stress pattern into agreement with the previous or following line, I tended to use it. This wasn’t the case one hundred percent of the time, though. As I read the full sentences out loud I tried to go with what sounded natural and satisfying (which is why “winding” was removed and replaced so many times).

Forest Path

A forgotten forest path
Called out my name as I 
Was about to pass it by.  
This path, it drew me in.  
It passed among trees 
Whose roots shared with fallen leaves 
Its enticing open way.  
When I reached a bend 
And knew the path would end, 
It built a bridge, 
And I continued on.  
When I looked back, the bridge was gone.  
At the foot of a hill
Was a misty green copse, 
And there it drew stairs covered in moss.  
It approached a ravine
Into which I wandered 
Down a flight of winding steps it conjured.  
Sunlight scattered through the leaves.  
A golden beam caressed my cheek 
When I knelt beside the icy creek.  
The path reached a shallow cave
Where water seeped from the walls 
With the subtle sound that calls
To a person to slow, 
To stop, to listen, 
To watch the water glisten.  
There, I fell asleep
Resting my back against a tree, 
And never again did I see
That enchanted forest path.  
When I opened my eyes 
It was to the leafless skies 
Above my own backyard,  
And though I've searched for many years
That forgotten forest path never reappears.  

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