Sorrow Bay Grief Point
Sad Rocks Desolation Sound
Old Fears Blind Alley
Morbid Channel Grim Look-Out
Good Hearts Cove Safe Harbour
from Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper (Harbour Publishing: 2015)
The Choka form alternates five and seven syllable lines and ends with the second seven syllable line. Chokas can be any length and do not demand rhyming endings or even metre although the ear will always look for rhythm in any line or sentence. Or at least mine does. I always read my work out loud, prose or poetry, fiction or non-fiction and even then, my idiosyncratic take on some words may not please another reader's ears. I am often guilty of wanting to make people laugh by juxtaposing images as in this choka poem where I wrote down names from two wall-mounted maps in the Egg Island radio room, delighting in the nuances for some long-ago sailors who were obviously having a terrible, no-good, very bad day to call a stretch of water 'morbid channel' or a point of land 'grim look-out'!
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