We Wordle #33

Sadly I have to announce that Red Wolf Poems will present its last prompt on 1 January 2015. So there’ll still be two more prompt Thursdays to go before our finale.

But no worries, I’m sure, as there’re no lack of prompts in cyberspace and for some of us who’ve been on the prompt circuit long enough, we’ll still be cherry-picking prompts. We’re prompt maniacs for a good reason. It really helps to get a poem going and we can compare and contrast our poems with others who’ve written to the same prompt.

Enough said, though. Let’s get to this week’s prompt. It’s a wordle so here’re the words. One word selected from each of the poems submitted to Barbara’s trance prompt last week.

Barbara: stillness
Misky: moody
Christopher: slope
Hannah: mandala
Jules: fading
Purpleinportland: tobacco
Viv: time
Irene: sacred
Debi: shallowness

In addition to using the words above in your poem, you are further urged to write in the manner of an interior monologue contemplating the nature of existence. A meditation. An argument with God. Whatever gets your goose. You can draw inspiration from nature and be as desultory as you like (like skipping stones over water) but the overall subject is a deep contemplation of life.

I’ll quote bits from Theodore Roethke’s long poem, “What Can I Tell My Bones?” so you get the drift:

A bird sings out in solitariness
A thin harsh song. The day dies in a child.
How close we are to the sad animals!
I need a pool; I need a puddle’s calm.

*

The self says, I am;
The heart says, I am less;
The spirit says, you are nothing.

*

Mist alters the rocks. What can I tell my bones?
My desire’s a wind trapped in a cave.
The spirit declares itself to these rocks.
I’m a small stone, loose in the shale.
Love is my wound.

*

To try to become like God
Is far from becoming God.
O, but I seek and care!

I rock in my own dark,
Thinking, God has need of me.
The dead love the unborn.

*

A prisoner of smells, I would rather eat than pray.
I’m released from the dreary dance of opposites.
The wind rocks with my wish; the rain shields me;
I live in light’s extreme; I stretch in all directions;
Sometimes I think I’m several.

*

I recover my tenderness by long looking.
By midnight I love everything alive.
Who took the darkness from the air?
I’m wet with another life.
Yea, I have gone and stayed.

Sometimes don’t you, like me, think that’s what the hullabaloo about poetry is all about? To think with emotions and at the core of life, there’s a coil of emotions, serpent-like. Or do you think life is hollow? We are nothing. We are everything.

There you answer all by writing a poem.