Written April 23, 2025
Prompt: Write a poem with an underlying pulse or sense of meter (Meter Lab 1)
Rays of sunlight at the end of day
Streaming lazy through waters wavy
Forging paths with orange shafts
A truly magnificent display.
Shards of red cut through
a mosaic of water rough
and give into a finer picture
of nature, more than a painting.
And like a tapestry of clouds long
the sky’s song is a pleasant one,
the song of birds, chirping and calling—
a symphonic euphony of life.
And then the sun,
done with its show of colors,
vanishes behind the horizon,
one day over, until dawn.
Inspirations and Comments
This was the second poem I wrote in response to the Meter Lab prompt from a language arts curriculum (you can read the first poem here). This is one of my more traditional poems, in the sense that each stanza is exactly four lines, and it follows a complicated rhyme scheme that’s not always apparent in each stanza. This is also just a “scene-description” poem, meaning it paints a picture based on a natural landscape or scene. In fact, the featured image for this post is a location from the 2024 International Offshore excursion, and it’s this beach that this poem’s metaphors are largely based upon. Remember that this poem was written in the first half of 2025, so the events of the 2024 excursion were still relatively fresh in mind.