In the back yard the girl is digging a hole
to China, while in the lavender the bees mutter
in anticipation and in the tree red winged blackbirds
flash their epaulets. The girl strikes gold!
The bees hum out the news, the blackbirds flutter
semaphore. Now for the hose, the hole wants to become a lake.
Did mother call? The birds, the bees, the girl pretend they haven’t heard.
Doesn’t she know about digging holes? Some tasks can’t wait.

Prompted by this, at NaNoWriMo.net: “try an eight-line poem called a san san, which means “three three” in Chinese (It’s also a term of art in the game Go). The san san has some things in common with the tritina, including repetition and rhyme. In particular, the san san repeats, three times, each of three terms or images. The lines rhyme in the pattern a-b-c-a-b-d-c-d.”

Image: Spade by Flickr user StefZ, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.