Hello poets and poetesses! Melissa here, from Mom With a Blog. I hope that your new year has started off with a bang! If it hasn’t, I hope this first Quadrille Monday of 2024 adds some excitement to your life.🙃

Quadrille, you ask? A dVersian creation, a quadrille is a poem of exactly 44 words, including one word given by your pubtender (me today).

Lacuna, lake and lagoon all come ultimately from lacus, the Latin word for “lake.” Latin speakers modified lacus into lacuna to form a word meaning “pit,” “gap,” or “pool.” The first known use of “lagoon” as meaning “shallow sound, channel, or pond” was recorded in 1673.(Source)

A lagoon is a shallow body of salt water connected to a larger body and separated by barrier islands, coral reefs, or sand bars. Lagoons are also called bays, estuaries, lakes, and sounds. Those sheltered by barrier islands or sandbars are known as coastal lagoons. At low tide, coastal lagoons are swampy wetlands.

The Outer Banks in North Carolina are barrier islands that create a series of lagoons known as sounds: Albemarle Sound, Currituck Sound, and Pamlico Sound.

Many lagoons are rich in biodiversity, and they are homes to everything from dolphins to jellyfish to leaches, mollusks, sea slugs, turtles…

There is the 1954 cult classic Creature from the Black Lagoon, about a group of scientists who try to capture a strange, prehistoric creature in the Amazonian jungle. There was the (now lost) British silent film adaptation, Blue Lagoon, based on the book of the same name by Henry De Vere Stacpoole. Another British adaptation followed in 1949, and an American version (that Roger Ebert called “the dumbest movie of the year”), starring Brooke Shields, in 1980.

A 1990s book series by Mike Thaler that began with The Teacher from the Black Lagoon also includes a principal, librarian, school nurse, cafeteria lady, etc.

Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon is not a lagoon at all, but a manmade accident turned hot spring spa, full of sulfur and silica, which give it its blue tint. The combination of algae and minerals found in the water are known to have healing properties for skin conditions and others.

Here are a couple poems.

“The Lost Lagoon” by Emily Pauline Johnson

It is dusk on the Lost Lagoon,
And we two dreaming the dusk away,
Beneath the drift of a twilight grey—
Beneath the drowse of an ending day
And the curve of a golden moon.

It is dark on the Lost Lagoon,
And gone are the depths of haunting blue,
The grouping gulls, and the old canoe,
The singing firs, and the dusk and—you,
And gone is the golden moon.

O lure of the Lost Lagoon—
I dream to-night that my paddle blurs
The purple shade where the seaweed stirs—
I hear the call of the singing firs
In the hush of the golden moon.

“The Eels of the Lagoon” by William Logan

I am not sure, even now, what troubled me
about the eels. Fifty years ago, I was forced
to leave a whaling village whose saltbox houses
shored against the salt-hay fields
in bleached, frigid, miserable emptiness…
the wavering line of dunes, the swollen river, the blank ocean.
In the dim corridor of the shingled wharf,
the light caught, refracted by dusty panes,
watery troughs lifting the catch of thin-shelled steamers;
gladiatorial lobsters, their lumpish claws pinned
by wooden wedges; mussels the forbidden indigo
of twilight. From the sweatered neck of a clam 
jetted forth a stinging, whispery stream
of salt water, baptising me in the eye.

I was still a stranger to Venice then.
The first time I viewed that floating world, 
the Grand Canal was plumed in frozen mist,
a curtain of fog aslant the corrugated waters,
as if closing on an old, rarely applauded play.
Across from the flaking bandbox of Ca' d'Oro,
the fishmongers had just opened their stalls.
The market's columns, squatter than the common
Palladian orders, were carved no later
than my father's father's time. The past
makes its small homages, as it must,
even in such a capriccio of the Jazz Age,
the stone capitals elaborately chiseled
into the hulls of wherries, grimacing visages
of octopus and squid, agreeable monsters of the lagoon,
guardians to protect the salty turns of commerce.

I smelled then the old desire. The salty stink,
the nearness of the ocean's flesh, filled me
with an abiding — I am not ashamed to admit -
nostalgia for it, the unnamed and unreachable it,
the it of those early voiceless scenes. What ransoms
must they require, childhood and its losses? 
Having sought them in the fish markets
of Istanbul and Paris, I waited for that slightly foul,
antiquated odor to return me again
to those seeping reliquaries, so that once more
I might enter Paradise.

                            That morning, all came to view:
the placid tuna hacked into agate slabs;
the warty, demonic bottom fish slumped in mortal piles,
an upended crab flailing a stiffened claw.
Off to one side, in a stainless steel tray, for sale
like the rest, like glistening bejeweled intestines,
lay man's first great tempter and antagonist, 
the serpent. Of course these weren't serpents
lying dead before me, merely common eels,
mud-feeders, greasy, tough as rawhide,
a nature morte fetched by some jobbing
Sienese painter. Just beyond the tray
lay the glinting knife, the pile of skinned 
and eviscerated carcasses, even the rough skins,
like Michelangelo's oily, sloughed-off rag 
held up in the Sistine Chapel. Silence
rose from the blood-smeared block,
where all had grown still. Then one of the bodies
slid against its neighbor, and all gruesomely turned
together, like the terrible gears of a clock. 

Recalling this now, I am not sure I have caught
their sad composure, their curious complaisance,
as if they had suffered all this before,
though even worse than the dying was the watching.

From Poetry Magazine, May 2007.

Are her eyes like lagoons? Is there a lagoon in your spaghetti? Does your heart harbor hidden lagoons? Lagoon-like, lagoonic, play around with words, make up your own words, just use some form of the word lagoon in your poem of exactly 44 words, no more, no less.

If you’re new, here is how to join us:

• Write a poem in response to the prompt.
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• Read other poets’ work as they enter their links into Mr. Linky. Check back as more will be added.
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• Have a wonderful time!🎉