Short Flights

Chapter 65: FIRE-HUNTING.

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About This Book

The collection gathers short lyrical poems and sonnets that meditate on seasonal change, love and its vicissitudes, friendship and parting, aspiration and disappointment, and quiet domestic and natural scenes. Many pieces favor intimate first-person reflection, blending pastoral imagery—gardens, birds, waves, and twilight—with moral and spiritual concerns about faith, striving, and memory. Varied short forms, occasional rondeau and sonnet sequences, produce compact musicality and a tone alternating between wistfulness and gentle affirmation, while recurring motifs of journey, secret longing, and consolation knit the individual lyrics into a unified contemplative arc.

FIRE-HUNTING.

WITH dip and glide a light canoe

Crept through the waters of the lake;

So softly, lightly creeping through

That it did not the silence break.

A lantern’s penetrating glow

Burned in the dark a path of light,

And far-off, on its margin, lo!

A pair of eyes gleamed strangely bright!

The paddling ceased; there fell a hush.

Then came a ringing rifle-shot—

A plunge into the underbrush—

Upon the beach a dark blood-clot!

With dip and glide a light canoe

Crept through the waters of the lake,

So softly, lightly creeping through

That it did not a ripple make.