Poetry Duel 33

A few fine words
​(at least, only a few words!)
 This week's duel is all about story-telling and imagination. The story-teller can take you anywhere and nowhere. The story is never right or wrong, it just is. The reader has the same rights of interpretation as the teller and every time a story starts is a new opportunity for ti to go somewhere new or somewhere familiar.
My poem attempts to capture that ambiguity and wonderful always new feeling.
Robert Louis Stevenson's fabulous, classic collections of poems for children - A Child's Garden of Verses - contains many gems. This one revels in the imagination of children, may that imagination never be lost as adults. 
PREMISE
Vote for which poem you prefer. Leave a note. Send me one of your to be in a future duel. Read them. Enjoy them.
PARTICIPATION
If you would like one of your poems featured, please reach out to me. I love to promote others' good works!
FINALLY
At the bottom will be a piece of flash fiction, sometimes mine, sometimes not.

As I Like It #33

Story
​Greg Schroeder, unpublished
  
Let me tell you a story
A story both old and young
Full of honor and disgrace,
Glory and humiliation,
Discovery and forgetfulness.
It is a disputed story,
No narrator spins it true
Though all can agree
On so many plots
That each is, indisputably,
Reciting the same tale.
It begins 100,000 years ago
Or not, as the first
Difference in the telling
Emerges at the very start.
Pirate Story
by Robert Louis Stevenson
​
Three of us afloat in the meadow by the swing,
Three of us aboard in the basket on the lea.
Winds are in the air, they are blowing in the spring,
And waves are on the meadow like the waves there are at sea.
Where shall we adventure, today that we're afloat,
Wary of the weather and steering by a star!
Shall it be to Africa, a-steering of the boat,
To Providence, or Babylon, or off to Malabar?

Hi! but here's a squadron a-rowing on the sea -
Cattle on the meadow a-charging with a roar!
Quick, and we'll escape them, they're as mad as they can be,
The wicket is the harbor and the garden is the shore.

Flash Fiction

The land lay waiting. Spring had come with all the chaos of seeds bursting forth into new plants and old plants stretching their roots. Summer had come with all the activity that the warmth and the light brings to the myriad living things. Then fall had come with the frenetic work of the harvest and the winding down and retreating to a lazy, drifting rest for the plants and animals that would overwinter. And now the land itself was ready for its long winter nap, happy to rest, at least for a season.
​
​Unpublished, by Greg Schroeder 

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