Sunday, April 22, 2018

Day 22 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2018


Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: "I’ve found this one rather useful in trying to ‘surprise’ myself into writing something I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise. Today, I’d like you to take one of the following statements of something impossible, and then write a poem in which the impossible thing happens."
The sun can’t rise in the west.
A circle can’t have corners.
Pigs can’t fly.
          The clock can’t strike thirteen.
The stars cannot rearrange themselves in the sky.
A mouse can’t eat an elephant.
Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: "For today’s prompt, pick a plant, make it the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Pick a favorite vegetable or fruit, a flower, a tree, even a shrubbery."

Spider Plant

The sun can’t rise in the west but it did.
Though that’s not the first weird thing I noticed.
The baby spider plants hanging there started
shrinking. Snaking upwards, their little tethers
slid back into the mama plant. This took a few days,
almost imperceptible. And then I saw the sun setting
in the east. No one else seemed to notice the world
running backward. They just went on with their lives.
And the stars rearranged themselves in the sky,
forming a giant open mouth. With a humongous
forked tongue. And a forest of very sharp fangs.
The spider plant, terrified, pulled in its leaves and
slipped downwards into the dry soil of its clay pot.
I wish I could hide. Take me with you, Spider!

—Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]


Well, that took an interesting turn! I had no idea where that was going to go. And it wouldn't have gone that way if I hadn't had to put the plant somehow into the center of it all. It was also an accident that this ended up being 14 lines long. I didn't set out to write a sonnet, unrhymed or whatever. But there it is.


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.   


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9 comments:

Mary Chipman said...

I really like it and how you focused on the reaction of one thing, a spider plant, which somehow made it scarier!

Bruce Niedt said...

That's happened to me a number of times, too - writing a poem that just happens to come out sonnet-length. Sometimes I try rewriting it as a sonnet too. Good poem - I like the image of the spider plant "ungrowing".

Vince Gotera said...

Mary: thanks. Of course, there's always the possibility that the speaker of the poem is mentally unbalanced! And so he's hallucinating everything described in the poem too.

Vince Gotera said...

Bruce: thank you. I did start off writing a curtal sonnet, but got about three lines in and abandoned that approach. Still, it went sonnet without my knowing!

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