Another poem derived from my trip to the sculpture garden at Minnetrista, Minnesota. That Monarch Butterfly on the boy's toe is actually a part of the statue. That sculpture garden was a wonderful place for my Muse to play.

This poem is an Amaranth Poem. I rhymed this one, to the Potlatch, Magic 9 scheme.
The Amaranth is an invented verse form that was created as a teaching tool by Viola Gardner. It makes deliberate use of the 9 most common metric feet. Each line is "one metric foot", with the pattern changing from line to line.
The Amaranth is a 9 line strophe (it is a stand alone poem); that is metric, using the 9 most common metric feet in a sequence. The sequence can vary as long as it uses one of the 9 meters in each line. Here I show a stressed syllable as "/", while an unstressed one is "-". In my example I used:

L1 Spondee.........(//)
L2 Iamb...............(-/)
L3 Trochee..........(/-)
L4 Amphribach....(-/-)
L5 Amprimancer.(/-/)
L6 Choriamb.......(/--/) Note; this 4 syllable foot
L7 Phyric.............(--)
L8 Anapest..........(--/)
L9 Dactyl.............(/--)

The form can be rhymed at the discretion of the poet. Although the metric restrictions are probably more than enough to contend with by most poets in this verse form.

Some definitions vary. I have seen a couple that insist that the sequence must be fixed as:
L1 Spondee (//)
L2 Iamb (-/)
L3 Pyrrhic (//)
L4 Dactyl (/--)
L5 Trochee (/-)
L6 Amphimacer (/-/)
L7 Choriamb (/--/)
L8 Anapest (--/)
L9 Amphibrach (-/-)
But that is just the sequence originally created by Viola. The key is accommodating the 9 meters in some sequence. Bysides being a good teaching tool, this is a good brain exercise for any poet who wants to bone-up on their meters.

To accommodate the Magic 9 challenge, the rhyme scheme is:
abacadaba.
I used a near rhyme on the last line for the "a" rhyme.

This photograph was taken by the author himself on September 30, 2017.

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