One of the things that I love about talking walks with my younger son is erratic quality of his attention. He notices things that I’ve skipped over or looked past - he stopped the other day to linger over a broken hyacinth - and he’s receptive to a wider range of beauty. Walking to school the other day, he paused, mid-intersection, with low WHOA of amazement. The source? A huge, low-hanging magnolia tree, just a day or so from full bloom. An easy target for wonder. But he sees other things, too: a pile of sticks and grass on the sidewalk, the dried ivy climbing the side of his neighbor’s house.
I hope you’ll keep walking (or scooting or bike-riding or driving, whatever you can do now; I used to love public transportation as opportunity for looking, alas) and looking for Real Things. You can probably find some real things inside your own home, too.
Today’s prompt is a bit in the spirit of that mixed attention, and what happens when you jam things together, like the rusted pole of this telephone pole brace against the backdrop of the lovely path down to the river behind my house.
Prompt #3: Monster Mash
take two older poems and fold them down the page length-wise, then mash them up, i.e. mixing the beginning of the first line of the first poem with the ending of the first line of the other poem, and so on.
Sharing your work helps sustain momentum. I’ll leave the comments open, so you can share a poem title, a snippet of a line, or something else about your writing life. If you’re on twitter, you can share with the hashtag #writemore.
It was really hard to stick with a mash-up and not get distracted by other drafts/possibilities. I made myself "finish" a mash-up though. Title and first two lines: "I had no intention of bringing those boys home"
I remember damp hay, the sky the night
in the big cat enclosure, called it a fever
She talks with those hands and coffee cups
flips them up some good
to stop us. Wait!
then she opens them up a pluck
like a book just right
or a butterfly’s back