Petals: Now Let Us Engage Her Elsewhere
.
Somewhere in the poem
there will be a small child.
She is always talkative, and busy.
Sometimes she is deeply engaged.
We must explain everything at
her level so that she may
more fully understand.
.
Today her animation centres
around flowers. But wait,
she goes back for leaves;
another flower, or part thereof,
plucking so quickly she brings
little in her hand. She is running
back for more but we must call
her in from the rain.
.
When she comes, her warm hands
brush mine with a single petal
and staring back at the blank, barely
discernible, space, certainly not
a half plucked bloom, she begins
to cry and cries the more
on seeing that the oblong petal,
having been singularly plucked
can never be put back whole.
.
When the rain stops we show her
this happens to plants anyway.
Flowers drop petals, drop flowers.
She pulls back unconvinced.
.
Now let us engage her elsewhere
lest our/her small timeframe is lost.
.
Benita H. Kape © 29.4.2017
And now for our (optional) prompt. Today, I’d like to challenge you to take one of your favorite poems and find a very specific, concrete noun in it. For example, if your favorite poem is this verse of Emily Dickinson’s, you might choose the word “stones” or “spectre.” After you’ve chosen your word, put the original poem away and spend five minutes free-writing associations – other nouns, adjectives, etc. Then use your original word and the results of your free-writing as the building blocks for a new poem.
The poem I chose was by Brian Turner, Otago, New Zealand “Flowers”.
Petal was my key noun. Petal, in that poem, was used in a way one didn’t quite expect. There was definitely no child in Brian’s poem.
benitakape 