 Hey, we've been here before! "Things to do around Seattle" and "Things to do Around a Ship at Sea" both by Gary Snyder, were a hit six months ago when we first looked at his poems as a prompt. This time around, we take a different spin on it by utilizing the real and the imagined in writing about the things to do around _____. First Mentor PoemHear Chris Martin read "Things to Do in Hell" here  Chris Martin, "Things to Do in Hell." Copyright © 2019 by Chris Martin. Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/149081/things-to-do-in-hell Poem Prompt #1:Imagine yourself in an abstract place, a frame of mind, in a piece of music, a favorite place in a novel, wherever . . . and write about the things to do there. Write this poem for 10 minutes. Ready? Go! Second Mentor Poem Ted Berrigan, “Things to Do in New York (City)” from The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. 2005 Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55276/things-to-do-in-new-york-city Poem Prompt #2Pick a real, tangible, specific place and explore all the things to do there – physical and metaphysical. Real and imagined. Write this poem for 12 minutes. Ready? Write!
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| The Last Wolf —Mary TallMountain The last wolf hurried toward me through the ruined city and I heard his baying echoes down the steep smashed warrens of Montgomery Street and past the ruby-crowned highrises left standing their lighted elevators useless Passing the flicking red and green of traffic signals baying his way eastward in the mystery of his wild loping gait closer the sounds in the deadly night through clutter and rubble of quiet blocks I hear his voice ascending the hill and at last his low whine as he came floor by empty floor to the room where I sat in my narrow bed looking west, waiting I heard him snuffle at the door and I watched He trotted across the floor he laid his long gray muzzle on the spare white spread and his eyes burned yellow his small dotted eyebrows quivered Yes, I said. I know what they have done. Source: Library of Congress |
| The Last Time BY RACHEL MCKIBBENS I did it alone, without leaving. The welt on my face still hot, I crept downstairs, pried open the toolbox and grabbed the hammer with his initials burned deep into the handle. Upstairs, my brother slept in his room, a glass box of reptiles watching over him. I turned the knob slowly, and stood over my father's body, his chest heaving, then sinking, when his tongue rattled, then stopped, and the whites of his eyes rolled over, and he stared only at the weapon in my hand and I looked at him and said, If you ever touch us again, I will kill you. Rachel McKibbens, "The Last Time" from Pink Elephant. Copyright © 2009 by Rachel McKibbens. Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/153340/the-last-time |
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Hunger
AMA CODJOE When I rose into the cradle of my mother’s mind, she was but a girl, fighting her sisters over a flimsy doll. It’s easy to forget how noiseless I could be spying from behind my mother’s eyes as her mother, bulging with a baby, a real-life Tiny Tears, eclipsed the doorway with a moon. We all fell silent. My mother soothed the torn rag against her chest and caressed its stringy hair. Even before the divergence of girl from woman, woman from mother, I was there: quiet as a vein, quick as hot, brimming tears. In the decades before my birthday, years before my mother’s first blood, I was already prized. Hers was a hunger that mattered, though sometimes she forgot and I dreamed the dream of orange trees then startled awake days or hours later. I could’ve been almost anyone. Before I was a daughter, I was a son, honeycomb clenching the O of my mouth. I was a mother-- my own—nursing a beginning. Source: Poets.org |
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Midnight Office
BY CYNTHIA CRUZ The child is not dead. She is sleeping. Gone from this world Which is broken. The angel of Michael Outside the garden His circle of fire Maddening around the tree. He put the word Back into her: A heavy kind of music. Then she was free. As we all are. All night I stood in the icy wind, Praying for the storm to destroy me. But the wind blew through me Like I was a hologram. If you say I am a mystic, Then fine: I’m a mystic. The trees are not trees, anyway. Source: Poetry Foundation |
"Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight."
~From NATURE AND WALKING Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Source: https://www.poetryfoundation .org/poetrymagazine/poems/ 42227/and-day-brought-back-my-night |  Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/48418/sad-steps |
| Mother Night Jim Harrison from Saving Daylight. When you wake at three AM you don't think of your age or sex and rarely your name or the plot of your life which has never broken itself down into logical pieces. At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension wherein the galaxies make more sense than your job or the government. Jesus at the well with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid than your car. You can clearly see the bear climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children's story no one ever wrote. Your childhood horse named June still stomps the ground for an apple. What is morning and what if it doesn't arrive? One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked me if God was the same species as we are? Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber's sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road, burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window. She said, "Only lunatics save newspapers and magazines," fried me two eggs, then said, "If you want to understand mortality look at birds." Blue moon, two full moons this month, which I conclude are two full moons. In what direction do the dead fly off the earth? Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day. |
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