Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? I love to read poetry though I don’t do it regularly. Last year, I tried to post a poem (not written by me) every day on social media. The best part about the endeavor is that it got me reading and thinking about poetry again and I’ve been playing around with the form here and there ever since.
A while back, the prompt from my writing group was:
I want you to paint a picture with words. Set the scene where the action is taking place. Where is the character in your story: mall, bookstore, the kitchen. It could also be France, Italy, or the desert! You could describe a house, room in the house.
I knew that there would be roses. That was about it. There was no story, no plot. I just wanted to create something indulgently descriptive. It felt more like writing poetry than prose fiction. So after I presented it to my group, I decided to take the original 350-word draft and turn it into a poem. It was really fun to take the sentences apart, just keeping the juiciest words and essential ideas, and to play with the typesetting – using line breaks, spacing, and punctuation in ways that I would never let anyone get away with in text.
Here is the result. I hope you enjoy it.
She stepped into the garden
The loamy, chocolate brown soil
hugged her ghostly bare feet
the way that children hug each other –
in an ecstatic, joyful embrace
Unkempt rosemary sentinels
guarded the open-air hide-away and
brushed her threadbare, calico-printed skirt,
lush branches of spiky green leaves releasing their spell
… remember, remember …
As she inhaled deeply,
a long-forgotten door in her addled mind
began to open
The air was still heavy with the chill of the previous night
and she shuddered
(did that door create a draft?)
Morning’s golden rays
flooded into the small clearing,
illuminating a stone bench
that resembled a leopard, lounging
on a low-hanging Buffalothorn branch
Somber black granite shone like polished obsidian,
the leopard luxuriating in the sunlight
as if alive
Eleven paces to the beckoning beast
(how did she know that?)
Eleven paces to the warmth that the stone creature offered
(how long since she felt warm?)
But she didn’t move,
hesitant to mar the pristine surface of the undisturbed, tender dirt path
with her footprints
Roses the size of outstretched hands lined the path
The petals,
yellow near the center,
graduating to peach,
then to salmon,
a coral flourish dancing along the edges
Blossoms stretching toward the morning sun,
asking it to lighten the burden of last night’s dew
For one bloom, the sunlight came too late
Its laden petals could no longer hold the weight
and collapsed
She sprung toward the disintegrating rose,
attempting to capture it
before the pieces
fluttered to the ground
Crushing the petals in her hands,
the heady fragrance engulfed her
Her timid demeanor
evaporated in rose-scented sunlight
She strode confidently to,
and then reclined upon,
the sunlit cat
