Found



Found

It’s late October at the lake
I’m the only one here
the only one swimming
as an eagle glides in circles above

Though the view has changed
no longer softly verdant
now vibrant
spare
it’s inner core remains the same

The tiny island
just yesterday
a mound of lush green
is now bare jagged brown
with dangling scattered dashes of color

The sharply curved edge
of tangerine-rusty-gold hills
has cut a blazing line
into a background of blue

The air’s nippy
the water cold

I could feel lost and alone

but embracing solitude
with a sense of safety in the seasons
an acceptance of transition
while rhythmically pulling my strokes
 
I’m found

About this poem

What is the meaning of home? It’s different for all of us. Preparing to leave CT for the warmth of a Florida winter, I had a sense of loss of family, friends and my beloved lake. In the act of truly immersing myself in that feeling I discovered what home means to me.

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Written on October 29, 2022

Submitted by joankantor on November 15, 2022

Modified on March 05, 2023

41 sec read
62

Quick analysis:

Scheme XXXX XAAXX XXXXX XXXX XX X XXXX
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 673
Words 139
Stanzas 7
Stanza Lengths 4, 5, 5, 4, 2, 1, 4

Joan Kantor

Award-winning poet Joan Kantor lives with her husband in the village of Collinsville, Connecticut. Joan was a college counselor and disabilities specialist for many years. She has been a featured reader for the public television series Speaking of Poetry as well as for several art museums and galleries, and she has also been a featured poet in The Avocet Literary Journal. Additionally, she leads workshops, has mentored for Poetry Out Loud, and has judged and mentored for the Hill-Stead Museum’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival Fresh Voices Poetry Program. To fulfill her inclusive vision of the arts, Joan collaborates with both visual artists and musicians and currently performs in Stringing Words Together, an interactive performance of poetry and violin music. Joan’s work has been widely published in literary journals and her first collection, Shadow Sounds (Antrim House 2010), was a finalist in the Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Awards Contest (2010). She won First Prize for Poetry in The 2013 Hackney Literary Awards Poetry Contest and in 2015 her book, Fading Into Focus, took First Place for Poetry in The 23rd Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards Contest. Her collection, Too Close For Comfort, was published by Aldrich Press in 2016 . She recently completed an ekphrastic project, Her Children, with quilt artist Linda Anderson. Her most recent collection, Fading Into Focus, One Woman’s journey of re-education was an Eric Hoffer Awards finalist She is currently working on her next collection, Dual Impressions, original photos and poems. more…

All Joan Kantor poems | Joan Kantor Books

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1 Comment
  • Vixility
    First of all, I’m saving this poem to my personal collection of favorites. The imagery is utterly gorgeous—word-paint! Describing a formerly lush-green, distant island as now “bare jagged brown / with dangling scattered dashes of color” breathtakingly drew me into the realness of that autumn scene. The fourth stanza reminded me of so many impressionist works:

    The sharply curved edge
    of tangerine-rusty-gold hills
    has cut a blazing line
    into a background of blue

    “… tangerine-rusty-gold hills …” Who does that!

    For me, one of the most distracting things about free verse poems are the almost capricious line breaks chosen by their given authors. In this poem, “Found”, every single line break was perfect and made perfect sense. The word ‘spare’ of line 8 (the only word of that line), for example, fit perfectly there by itself and needed no assistance of any other word to convey what the narrator felt in that moment.

    Even the stand-alone stanzas of six and eight were perfectly self-sufficient and profound.

    From the echo “the only one, the only one” of the first stanza to the embracing of that “solitude” in the seventh, I was completely drawn into the narrator’s world. There is so much I would like to say about this poem, but I’ll end with this. If anyone ever asks me to give an example of a well written free verse poem that draws you into its vision, “Found” will no doubt be that poem. I hope others feel the same way about it as I do.

    Thank you, dear poet, for sharing this work
     
    LikeReply1 year ago

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"Found" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 25 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/145697/found>.

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