"The Cricket and the Grasshopper" by Dan Beachy-Quick

Dan Beachy-Quick is from Chicago, Colorado, and New York; and went to school in as many cities. The POL website says that his poems focus on "engagement with the fabric of sound and the pattern of echoes."

Key terms: free verse, enjambment, alliteration, caesura

The Cricket and the Grasshopper

The senseless leaf   in the fevered hand
Grows hot, near blood-heat, but never grows
Green. Weeks ago the dove’s last cooing strain
Settled silent in the nest to brood slow
Absence from song. The dropped leaf cools
On the uncut grass, supple still, still green,
Twining still these fingers as they listless pull
The tangle straight until the tangle tightens
And the hand is caught, another fallen leaf.
The poetry of the earth never ceases
Ceasing — one blade of grass denies belief
Until its mere thread bears the grasshopper’s
Whole weight, and the black cricket sings unseen,
Desire living in a hole beneath the tangle’s green.

What a beautiful image... this poem is refreshing, in a way, after the sharp dissonance of the previous two this week. Still written in free verse (no rhyme scheme), it reads more smoothly and feels nicer to speak. This is the kind of poem you just automatically need to read out loud, because the diction is so pleasing. The enjambment that is more prominent in the first half of the poem forces a quicker reading of the lines, so that the images are clear to the reader. The theme that is introduced with "The poetry of the earth never ceases / Ceasing" slows the reading down, and the caesura in these lines forces a more thoughtful reading. The resolution in the last two lines (the completed statement and rhyming of "unseen" and "green") seems almost out of place in the melancholy theme, but it is all the same delightful. I almost don't want to think to deeply about what this poem "means" because it is so sonically beautiful for me. 

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/245234