When planning a meal for my guests,
a poet could afford fresh fish
all those years ago, and good wine –
dessert would be joy together.

I pull a thin coat around me
when planning a meal for my guests,
there is no butcher to barter,
there is no fishmonger to plead.

I still have the goblets from my
father’s house, so fine with gold rims,
when planning a meal for my guests
I will bring them out and fill them.

No matter what the meat, the sauce
will be thick and vegetables thin,
the wine will be merry and much
when planning a meal for my guests.

Copyright ©2025 Lisa Paul

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Laura Bloomsbury is the host of Meeting the Bar and her challenge today is to write the Quatern

I took my inspiration from the lines

“back in the days when fish fresh from the Baltic
wasn’t priced beyond the means of a poet,…” written by Günter Grass in his poem “My Epitaph, Written in Sprigs of Dill”

“The Quatern (Latin= 4 each) is a French verse form, possibly from the Middle Ages since it is so close to the Retourne and Kyrielle. It also employs a refrain…. from stanza to stanza. [source]

Poetry style:

• 16 lines in total
• divided into 4 quatrains (4 line stanzas)
• 8 syllables per line (iambic tetrameter an optional metre)
• 1st line is the refrain which moves consecutively downward through the 4 stanzas as Line I L2, L3, L4
• usually unrhymed but this is at your discretion

Poetry Theme
An optional suggestion is to engage with one of Gunter Grass’s poems:

• taking a quote as an epigram
• write an answer to/ response to one of his poems (for, against or along the same lines/style)

MTB: 16: 4: 8: in the Grass