Verse Wisconsin 105| Kenneth Pobo

Boat Ride

On Little Lake St. Germain, an eagle
shadows our rowboat. Over a couple
of decades back, DDT thinned out their
eggs. Once plentiful raptors became rare.
When the poisoning ended, they returned,
so the lake looks more as it did when I
was a kid. I’d like to think that we’ve learned
how even the strongest can quickly die—

I picture polar bears, thin Arctic ice
melting under their paws—they pay the price
for our greed. I try to enjoy two loons
diving and rising, diving and rising,
but it’s no use. The Earth gets awful wounds.
Our nightmare hands can strangle anything.

—Ken Pobo, Media, PA

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Ken Pobo

Kenneth Pobo has a new online chapbook called Fitting Parts (Philistine Press). A second chapbook, Tea on Burning Glass, will soon be published by Tandava Poetry Press. He lived in Wisconsin for six years as a graduate student attending the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Now, he and his partner vacation in Wisconsin’s Vilas County every spring.

I chose the sonnet because it is a challenging form which can be fun. I wonder why that fourteen-line playing field allows so much energy and precision. The poem’s rhyme scheme isn’t that of a “normal” sonnet since mine begins with the off-rhymed couplet. For me, by definition, sonnets are difficult. Getting rhymes that don’t sound phony or jarring isn’t easy. The last two lines on this one took some doing. I even miscounted the syllables on line twelve, thus wrecking the rhyme pattern on the last three lines. Moreover, I miscounted the number of lines (oops) using fifteen rather than fourteen. Like taking a card from a house of cards, the poem trembles and falls. But I didn’t give up on it—I had come too far. The biggest surprise was in content. I “meant” to write a happy poem about seeing eagles. As I wrote, darker imagery came in. I suppose that isn’t so surprising as we are wiping Nature out. I decided to go with that direction.