Day 19 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2018

Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: "Today we challenge you to write a paragraph that briefly recounts a story, describes the scene outside your window, or even gives directions from your house to the grocery store. Now try erasing words from this paragraph to create a poem or, alternatively, use the words of your paragraph to build a new poem." Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: "For today’s prompt, take the phrase '(blank) Thread;' replace the blank with a word or phrase; make the new phrase the title of your poem; and then, write your poem. Possible titles include: 'New Thread,' 'Old Thread,' 'Twitter Thread,' and 'Blue Thread.'" I'd been fiddling off and on during the day with a transcript of Trump's speech justifying the recent Syria missile attack, hoping to get a decent erasure poem out of it. But no dice. So I went outside my office this evening and took this photo. And here's a haibun on the photo. The closing haiku is an erasure poem teased out from the opening prose, rendered in red, including punctuation. The Last Thread of Ice Is this last thread of ice outside my office building Old Man Winter’s final foot-tall bulwark of hardened snow? A mere twenty feet from where some thin ice hiding in plain sight slipped my feet out from under me six weeks ago, and I broke a rib. A man of 60+ has no business falling down on concrete, whether here at work or somewhere else, the sidewalk in front of my home, say. No amount of planning can save you if winter is out to get you just one more time — I’ve broken a rib three times before. Maybe that’s what they’ll say someday about the late Dr. Gotera: he was a danger to himself on the ice. My ancestral DNA equipped me for Pacific beach sand and a summer sunset, not a snowstorm or the aurora borealis, beautiful as they are, you know? Listen, you gotta watch out for that old scratch, Mr. Winter — he’s a trickster. Is Old Man Winter hiding out somewhere, planning one more late snowstorm?   —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Here's to Jack Frost being done with us! Fingers crossed. Uncle uncle uncle.  ヅ  Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don’t find the word “comments” in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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