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A three-line stanza or a three-line poem. There are many contemporary examples of poems written entirely in tercets.
An eagle egg fell into a farmer’s chicken shed
and when it hatched the farmer gave it chicken feed
even though he was the king of birds. The farmer
clipped the eaglet’s princely beak and raised him
Oliver Sacks is going to die,
He tells us blithely in the New York Times.
He’s 81. His liver’s shot.
He’s blind in one eye
Though when both worked fine
99.
From an original rock painting in Topock, Arizona, now digitized on a
wall-mounted monitor:
Before this city, the Creator pressed his staff
into the earth, and the earth opened—
We could read your words from anywhere
but you felt like the only soul sitting
in your swivel chair listening to your parents
dream-breathing down the hall while you typed
The books sit on the shelf, a row of coma patients
in a ward, a series of selves no longer able to learn
and trapped at the point of injury: the last page.
He totaled his blue truck —
slowly spun out on an icy bridge,
rammed it into a guard rail.
Coin Exhibit, British Museum.
Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,
like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel,
you are unaware of your obscure sources
but you are explicitly sure of the vast sea
as your final destination
In my body flows the blood of Gallic
Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle
ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
A boat, beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —
