If you’ve been following this project at all, you may remember that it started as a recreation of a classroom experience. After five weeks of only allowing us to do shorter form poetry like haiku and tanka, the teacher allowed us to move on to longer poems: one poem a week, at least 20 lines, any form. So I think I’m going to try that for the next five weeks.
Now, these will be little more than working poems, nothing to set the world afire, and the only reason I am doing this exercise publicly is to force my own hand. The object is to produce something, anything on a regular basis. I have seen some positive things coming from the short poem exercise, so I’m hoping that trend continues.
Since it’s Monday, my week for this phase of the project will go from Monday to Monday. So here’s number one, actually inspired by one of the shorter poems:
***
Who can know the soul of rivers?
I don’t. They turned our rivers to concrete
long before I was born, choking them
and channeling them on their journey
homeward to the sea, floodtide or flow.
We think they are tame, yet they fool us,
routinely eating children and the unwary.
Oceans I have seen and lived beside,
and no one would mistake them for tame.
Yet who can know the soul of such a vast,
primordial giant, changing with every glance,
moving moment by moment, hour by hour,
the protean mother surrounding the world?
Who can know the soul of rivers?
Wild or contained, channeled or flooding,
they flow through us but are hidden,
on their way home to the mother of us all.
***
ETA: Oops. I just realized I only made it to 17 lines above.
ETA #2: I remembered that the teacher was asking for poems to be at least as long as a sonnet and assumed that was 20 lines, but it’s actually 16. So I’m good!
And just for the hell of it, here’s a random box from my found paper one-a-day box folding project:
*For the poetry project, phase one go here.
*To see all the poems in one place go here.
