Photo by Walter Sturn via Unsplash
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Today’s prompt asks us to “write a poem about a specific place—a particular house or store or school or office. Try to incorporate concrete details, like street names, distances (“three and a half blocks from the post office”), the types of trees or flowers, the color of the shirts on the people you remember there. Little details like this can really help the reader imagine not only the place, but its mood—and can take your poem to weird and wild places.” ~ NaPoWriMo, Day 2
My Muse has left me for greener pastures, so I dusted up an old fragment and tried to breathe some life into it. It’s all I’ve got today, folks. Not sure it comes close to describing a place, but–if you squint your eyes hard enough… I don’t know. Maybe.
PS–Most of the poems written this April will remain online for up to five days, after which they will be replaced by an excerpt, an erasure, or a thoroughly amateurish art piece that will only allow for bits of the original poem to peek through. At least, this is the plan. The reason being that, at some point, in the hopefully not too distant future, these drafts will undergo revision and begin their multiple-year pilgrimage through the slush piles of many a literary journal. So help me, O Muse.
PPS–Since five days have already passed, the original poem has been replaced by an erasure. No trees have been harmed in the process. All the words in this erasure come from the original poem and follow one another in the original order, but occupy a different place on the page.
Poetry from the trenches, Day 2
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clayandbranches 
* “[quote deleted by RI]” – insert some people and their children here, LOL.
* The classic stories ants vs crickets, old vs new.
* And this:
[quote deleted by RI]
This all spoke to me particularly, but you have the talent to fit an entire novel in a poem. Love it!
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I am so happy you liked this poem!🥰 It kept growing and growing and it’s too early to start cutting. I need to put it aside before I know what it could do without.
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[quote deleted by RI]
This. This so resonates. As a child, I did that often enough, and perhaps as an adult, I do it even more. I love this entire piece, there’s a child’s logic that runs through it somehow that’s so identifiable, about love, life, death, and why. ❤ And it's definitely a place! Or places, as children somehow seem to have within them.
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Thank so much, Shuku–I’m so glad it resonates. I was hoping this piece would have enough detail to anchor it in a particular place–which is very vivid in my mind, but perhaps less so for someone who hasn’t been there. I’m heartened that you see a place!
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I do indeed see a place! It’s so easy to see too, with how vividly you’ve written it. It resonates particularly because as a child I was bullied quite extensively for a while, and now that I’m an adult, people seem to take my silence as license to misconstrue and say all sorts of bully-type things.
I really can’t wait to see what this piece becomes, but honestly, I feel it’s quite nearly perfect ❤
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That sounds familiar. I, too, was a silent, withdrawn child, and in many ways continue to behave similarly, though no longer a child. Kids used to take it as an affront. Some adults do too. People are unnerved by silence. It’s not their fault. Nor ours.
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