Fractured Island

Minocqua: island paradise

woodland wreathed in whispering waters

refraction of shimmering skies

For this week’s W3 prompt at the Skeptic’s Kaddish, Britta provided this beautiful poem and challenged us o write about a place with these guidelines:

“Include the name of a city (town, village) in your poem

• This could be your home town, or a place you have never been to but long to go, a travel memory, a dream, a tour guide…
• Maybe you’ll find that a particular form of poetry expresses a sense of that particular place perfectly?
  • Is there such a thing as a tanka town? A haiku hamlet? A villanelle village? Or perhaps, your chosen city is more of a free verse kind of hangout?“

I wrote about my hometown, which is (sort of) an island. It’s advertised as “The Island City”, though I’m pretty sure it’s technically a peninsula as it’s connected on one side. Minocqua, Wisconsin, is a unique place, though. It was never the most thrilling place to grow up, as you might imagine, in the state’s largest school district (in acreage, not in numbers), due to its very rural location. However, it’s home; it was and is a lovely place in many ways. I should note this image is sadly not mine for once but from the Minocqua.org tourism site, so I’ll give them the credit for capturing my hometown brilliantly from the bird’s eye view.

Speaking of birds, I wrote a kōel! The sound of these poems are meant to imitate the Asian koel bird, with alliteration in the middle line and a rhyme in the first and third lines, and you can create multiple stanzas for a kōel cluster or flock. I thought it would fit with a (sort of) island local.