We got us a dog at the pound.
He didn’t look much like a hound.
He likes to chase squirrels
Just as boys chase the girls,
And he loves to dig holes in the ground.

The dog from the pound we call Zeke.
You might think of him as a freak.
He’ll greet you with kisses
And in case he misses,
He’ll try again till he’s weak.

All right, enough.  Those lines are not poetry, even though they contain rhymes.  They are just Limericks.
I thought about how to go about writing poetry all day and part of the night.  Even though I knew what I wanted to write about I couldn’t get the first line.  I decided to write some examples of the closest I would ever come to writing poetry.

I wrote this of a Pine Mountain amphitheater:

Eons ago a little stream, storms, wind and snow began eroding a swath down the mountainside, until the amphitheater was formed.  It has left on one side of the stream a sheer rock more than a hundred feet high as a backdrop for the theater, and gently sloping ground reaching the forest on the other. 

The CCC boys had busied themselves modifying the nature of the land to create a showplace.  Their work provided a stage at the base of the cliff.  The stream was dammed to form a narrow reflecting pool in front of the stage.  A footbridge spanned the pool at center stage.  Mountain laurel outlining the front of the stage was kept low so as to not block the view.  Larger plants grew behind the stage.  Wherever the layers of rock in the cliff joined, the edges rounded through millennia of erosion, moss and wild flowers grew and laurel clung to the scant soil between.  Lichens darkened the face of the rock.  At the top of the cliff the usual forest vegetation could be seen.  It was a vivid tableau, indeed. 

Of sunrise over Grand Canyon I wrote:

As the darkness gradually dissipated, parts of the great abyss below began to appear in a faint, warm, rosy glow, becoming ever more intense.  The source of this glow appeared as an arc of fire, expanding to a full circle over the horizon.  Distant canyon walls began to appear, starting at the canyon rim and creeping downward as the circle of fire ascended into the sky.  The shadow hiding the canyon walls gradually fragmented to expose an infinity of shapes and hues.  The great pyramids of layered rock inside the canyon cast long shadows through the great gorge.  On our side of the canyon there were huge boulders, partly covered by many forms of vegetation that seemed to emit their own glow of multihued light, changing from minute to minute.

Acadia National Park inspired these words:

Mount Desert Island is a unique place.  Rising several hundred feet above the ocean is a solid granite knoll surrounded by rocky earth, which in turn is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and a deep fjord on another.  The whole area was shaped by the weight of the ancient glacier, which left much of the coastal land submerged.

At one point the shoreline is broken by a crevice in the rock, perhaps ten yards long.  It seemed to be an extra long sunken bathtub, open at one end to the sea.  Each incoming wave built up a wall of water that rushed in, filling the tub in seconds with a furious boom when a wall of water hit the tub’s end.  The tub emptied awaiting the next wave.  It is no mystery that this is called Thunder Hole.

Of sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean I wrote:

From our balcony we could watch the sun creep up out of the morning clouds that hovered over the horizon as if trying to prolong the night.  But the sun found a crack in the clouds, and sent through them brilliant beams, declaring victory over darkness.