Hi folks, Jim Fowler here again. There was a comment on my poem (ghazal) from last month, I wished to answer. Yes, you are right, 'squirrel' likely is a bad name. My only excuse is that I have used the alias through a dozen or so ghazals. But thinking about the comment, the alias likely doesn't work for the body of the work. I'll come up with another.
This month I have a sonnet. A loose Shakespearean sonnet to be exact, though I didn't follow the form exactly, I did end with a couplet, which anymore is the only clue to the type of sonnet. The epigraph says 'after Ezra Pound' only in that the trigger for the poem was his A River Merchant's Wife: A Letter. This poem originally was published in Pine Island Journal vol 5 #1.
Route 91, around here, runs just on the Vermont side of the Connecticut River. Bellows Falls is a village on the river.
Enjoy
Jim

A Sailor’s First Girl

When we used to play hide-and-seek you’d search
the neighborhood and come beneath the birch
and call my name. You’d always stand below
till I was down, then beat me back to home.

When I turned eighteen, I tired of the game
enlisted, volunteered, and went to ‘Nam.
You stayed around a couple years then left;
you wrote me of a need to find yourself.

Now, after thirty years, the birch is dead,
but nothing else around this place has changed.
Today a boy played hide-and-seek; I heard
a girl beneath the oak call out his name.

If you’re driving up 91, please call,
I’ll come meet you, as far as Bellows Falls.