Prompt from Napo.
Our featured participant for the day is this and other poems, a poem based on the word “afterwinter”.
… our featured online magazine is Rust and Moth, which has been publishing quarterly since 2008. I’ll point out Leah Claire Kaminski’s lyrical “Flung Girl,” and Lucia Owen’s moving “The Gardener’s Prayer.”
Prompt: This one is a bit complex, so I saved it for a Sunday. It’s a Spanish form called a “glosa” – literally a poem that glosses, or explains, or in some way responds to another poem. The idea is to take a quatrain from a poem that you like, and then write a four-stanza poem that explains or responds to each line of the quatrain, with each of the quatrain’s four lines in turn forming the last line of each stanza.
Traditionally, each stanza has ten lines, but don’t feel obligated to hold yourself to that! Here’s a nice summary of the glosa form to help you get started.
Getting your teeth stuck into longer weekend prompts when you barely have time to brush your teeth can be a challenge. Give it a go though, see how far you can delve!
Knowing I was time poor today, I spent my morning coffee over at the Napowrimo site. Starting as usual with the featured participant. this and other poems is a website I know, so I was excited to read Afterwinter. I read it several times.
through my window the sun cuts
the film dust,
I’m ready. It seems to say. Those sudden snows were mistaken. This is no place for silence. This is a place for celebration.
Exquisite!
We had 4 seasons of weather in one hour a few days ago, in the UK. I have never witnessed snow flurries followed by the brightest sunshine repeating over and over at five minute intervals. It was almost like watching fish fall from the sky!
I enjoyed reading through many poems in Rust and Moth and found the navigation of the issue easy. I returned after 6 poems to find which ones Maureen Thorson recommended and read them.
Flung girl
—after the painting “Christina’s World”, by Andrew Wyeth
blew my mind a bit (in a good way) – there is so much story to unravel.
bundle myself in warm skin and chlorophyll,
there is a particular rhythm to the
silence at the end of rage.
Having experienced a very recent bereavement I found The Gardener’s Prayer by LUCIA OWEN a difficult read. It is a skilfully written poem. Beautiful. I think it hit hard because Mr G. turned our garden over and we could see that once upon a time it had been planted with love and kept. Unfortunately the house had been on the market so long that we inherited a partially dead bedding area and some jungle sized overgrowth! But I always felt a bit unsettled at the change. We kept what we could. I am sure they would want us to have a gorgeous garden to enjoy spending time in too.
when someone else sees what she’s done
and wants to turn her lifework under,
take out the native ferns and honeysuckle,
the thick-trunked rhododendrons that she’s fed
and winter-covered for so long they pay in blooms
big as softballs pink and red,
I recommend these:
If you enjoy the poem, there are lots more here.
I wrote a peach poem back in 2015 but it is not a patch on this one.
There are lots of fantastic poems in this Journal and I look forward to dipping back in for a read.
I took a deep breath as I read today’s prompt and also realised the glossary explanation/summary was over on Writer’s Digest where the PAD (Poem a Day) Challenge is taking place. So of course I had to make note of the first 3 days of April over there too.
I love discovering forms which are new to me and the Glosa is. I decided straight away that my 4 lines would come from one of the striking poems I read in Rust + Moth today. I gathered them as quickly as I could, which was not very fast as I read another 10+ poems, read the summary of the form and Robert’s example poem (which does use 10 lines) and then set about working my 4 lines stanzas together.
In the end after reading every poem in this issue I returned to the first poem I read: Circadian Arrhythmia by Tiel Aisha Ansari. I picked my 4 lines quickly and surprised myself as they weren’t the 4 lines I thought I’d pick.
Sunset is marked only by the sudden blink
of streetlights, dawn by the electric buzz
of alarm clocks. I wake in the dark, adrift—
what time is it? Should I get up?
Now I had the extra challenge of dealing with enjambment and tenses as I struggled through the first draft of my grief poem.
The process:
Weaving someone else’s words into something as personal as a grief poem is an interesting exercise. But just like the Golden Shovel you are scaffolded by writing towards those end words. I found I wrote it quicker than I would without having those 4 end lines as a starting point.
as if grief had become an ocean and I
was the only person out here. The dark
waters did not answer my questions:
what time is it? Should I get up?
awritersfountain 