JanBeek

SIXTY-FOUR YEARS
(a heptameter)

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No, this “old coot” (who may have a wonderful sense of humor locked inside, by the way) is not sixty-four. He’s much older… and he reminds me of the subject of the poem below.

It’s a seven-syllable poem. I read somewhere, “Seven-syllable lines in English verse can have several different names.” I call mine heptameter. I heard that somewhere. I didn’t make it up.

Seven syllables on each line… a true story here… first published in our
Madison County Writers Anthology for the year. The subject was a 96-year-old for whom I was a senior companion. He was a hoot of an old coot!

a heptameter

The poem rings a loneliness bell, doesn’t it? Ah, but he loved company and he had a million stories locked inside, aching to be told.

Do you know a senior who lives alone? Why not decide to visit today – or give him/her a call.

By the way, doing a little research with Siri, I learned that in English poetry, you only count syllables in Haiku (a form borrowed from another language, of course)… not usually in other poetry forms. Other languages, like French, count syllables in most forms of poetry. The reason English poems don’t was explained this way: English is a stress-timed language, and French is a syllable-timed language. This means that in English, the number of stressed syllables in a line is generally more important than the total number of syllables … (and besides, depending upon what part of the country you’re from, the syllables differ … y’all relate, raught?)

Nevertheless, it was fun to write my Heptameter. You should try it. It’s fun!