I walked through a park last fall that was full of squirrels scurrying about. I must have seen 50 of them that day. It was on a boulevard full of mature oak trees. I captured a couple of them here. They inspired this poem.

This poem is a Pushkin Sonnet written in the english version.
The Pushkin Sonnet (aka: Onegin Sonnet), contains a couple of unique features, The first is in its meter, and the second is in its layout. It was popularized (or invented) by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin through his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. The work was mostly written in verses of iambic tetrameter with the rhyme scheme:
aBaBccDDeFFeGG,
where the lowercase letters represent feminine endings (i.e., with an additional unstressed 9th syllable) and the uppercase representing the typical masculine ending (i.e. stressed on the final 8th syllable). So that is the first feature mentioned.
However, the English version is written in Iambic pentameter, with the feminine 11th syllable occuring in the same sequence as the Italian.
The second unique feature involves the lack of stanzas. Unlike other traditional forms, such as the Petrarchan Sonnet or Shakespearean Sonnet, the Pushkin stanza does not divide into smaller stanzas of four lines or two in an obvious way.

This picture was taken by the author himself on October 17, 2014 along the East Mississippi Boulevard.

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