It’s that time of year when the gardener in me ventures out with new plans and older tasks. One of which is to complete plumbing a cascade I’ve built from rock rubble though that will have to wait until the month is a little warmer. Until then I went in search of some free flowing watery lines and came first to this extract of Henry Vaughan’s “The water-fall” –

…Dear stream! dear bank, where often I
Have sate and pleas’d my pensive eye,
Why, since each drop of thy quick store
Runs thither whence it flow’d before,
Should poor souls fear a shade or night,
Who came, sure, from a sea of light?
Or since those drops are all sent back
So sure to thee, that none doth lack,
Why should frail flesh doubt any more
That what God takes, he’ll not restore?…

And in this extract, Lauris Edmonds employs “The Waterfall” as a metaphor for ageing and a relationship:

I do not ask for youth, nor for delay
in the rising of time’s irreversible river
that takes the jewelled arc of the waterfall
in which I glimpse, minute by glinting minute,
all that I have and all I am always losing
as sunlight lights each drop fast, fast falling….

…But when you leave me, with your jauntiness
sinewed by resolution more than strength
– suddenly then I love you with a quick
intensity, remembering that water,
however luminous and grand, falls fast
and only once to the dark pool below..

So for todays Meeting the Bar challenge we are writing Cascade Poetry:
A form created by Udit Bhatia, repetitive in a smooth cascading way like a waterfall, reusing each line of the first stanza as a refrain in the subsequent stanzas.

Poetry Style:

• write a Hexaverse poem i.e. 6 stanzas
• each stanza has 5 lines (quintain)
• the first stanza provides the repeat lines for the next five stanzas
• repeats are made as the final line of these next stanzas

Poetry Structure:

• line 1 of stanza1 becomes the last line of stanza2
• line 2 becomes the last line of stanza 3 -and so on
• A,B,C,D,E – x,x,x,x,A – x,x,x,x,B – x,x,x,x,C – x,x,x,x,D – x,x,x,x,E

Poetry Rules:

• you must keep the opening stanza’s line order in the repeats
• avoid regular meter as the waterfall does
• there are no requirements to rhyme, syllable count, line length etc – its optional

Suggestion: For your opening quintain why not select one (or any 5 consecutive lines) from a previously written poem of yours? It might help get the ball rolling! Try to choose one without much enjambement as discrete lines make better sense here.
You might like to make the theme of your poem fit the notion of a cascade though its not necessary

Comment: We do not seem to have had a Cascade poetry style prompt at dVerse before though Amaya gave it as an extra challenge in a Poetics prompt of April 2019 as tercets – I’ve opted instead for quintains as there are so few rules, the words should flow!!

So once you have posted your poem according to the prompt’s guidelines above, do add it to Mr Linky below then go visiting and reading other contributors as that is half the fun of our dVerse gatherings.
[N.B. Mr Linky closes Saturday 3 p.m. EST]