Day 22 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2021

Happy Earth Day, o fellow earthlings! Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a nature poem. Write about the natural world, sure. But don't be afraid to delve into human nature or the nature of love or whichever other interpretation comes naturally to you. Poem on!” Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo suggestion today begins by citing a Poets & Writers prompt based on "an essay by Urvi Kumbhat on the use of mangoes in diasporic literature,” which maintains that “mangoes have become a sort of shorthand or symbol that writers use to invoke an entire culture, country, or way of life. This has the beauty of simplicity – but also the problems of simplicity, in that you really can’t sum up a culture in a single image or item, and you risk cliché if you try.” Today's prompt “challenge[s us] to write a poem that invokes a specific object as a symbol of a particular time, era, or place.” I use the mango again in linked haiku here, but in my mash-up of both prompts, the mango is not a symbol but rather a mountain. Mango World Partially eaten mango lying by the side of a park pathway. Nearby, an ant hill brims with workers and soldiers to explore this world: mountain of mango . . . deep within, the wrinkled seed a brown rocky mass. Workers swarm over the gigantic precipice of sweet, golden fruit, mango flesh seething with interlocked ant bodies, legs and antennae, in concert, a corps, individual soldiers bound in regiment, a bucket brigade made of thousands of bodies heaving together. The crag of mango starts to slip sideways toward the waiting ant hill. Slow lurching at first, then gradually moving faster, a smooth glide. The yellow mountain swallowed by the open mouth of the ant hill nest. The community  shivers in merriment, joy at mango treasure. Juicy mango meat will feed the giant city one bright, long season. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Today, Alan worked with, not the mango, but the mimosa. Mimosa A forked mimosa stood on the western edge of our property, its split so low I could straddle it or hoist myself up into it, climbing higher but never more than a man’s height from the ground. They broke easily. In spring, their blooms looked like the pink hair of Muppet fairies, and they would fill with webworms, building tents and feeding on the leaves, leaves so fragile that touching even healthy ones would trigger them to close, fragile as the tree itself, imported as ornament and bringing its own destroyer along with it. My home now, miles and years away, is filled with black locusts, bearing sharp thorns, sending shoots underground, and twisting upon itself as it grows, so that its own asymmetry supports it or its neighbor, leaving some standing dead, an imminent, heavy threat should it fall. I would be an oak, taking my time to mature, reaching all around and up. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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