#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Waking to woods and fields soaked by yesterday's heavy rain. The Queen Anne's Lace bowing. The tiger lilies grow wild in the meadow, and this one's like a flaming torch in the morning sunshine. We walk long enough to be satisfied. At home, I have gardening I want to do before writing. I dig many holes for new plants in the wet soil that's perfect for planting. There's a sweet breeze blowing across the yard in the sun.
I spend some time submitting poems. Then, I take the time to transcribe some spontaneous writing I did from prompts Vanessa Gabb shared in the narrative poetry workshop I attended last week at IWWG. I loved the process she offered in her workshop: First off, before anything else, she warmed us up to exploring the craft elements of the selected poem for discussion that day with prompting questions for a free write. The first day, I wrote what I hope will become a poem in answer to her prompting to write about a last day. The poem we were reading was one of Sharon Old's about the end of her marriage, "Last Look." However, instead of a last day, I wrote about two first days: after my youngest went to kindergarten, and the first day after my first love died. Those are the notes I transcribed, and they seem promising, even though they are still just notes.
Here's an excerpt from "Last Look," her poem published in "Stag's Leap."
“Last Look
In the last minute of our marriage, I looked into
his eyes. All that day until then, I had been
comforting him, for the shock he was in
at his pain — the act of leaving me
took him back, to his own early
losses. But now it was time to go beyond
comfort, to part. And his eyes seemed to me,
still, like the first ocean, wherein
the blue-green algae came into their early
language, his sea-wide iris still
essential, for me, with the depths in which
our firstborn, and then our second, had turned,
on the sides of their tongues the taste buds for the moon-bland
nectar of our milk ”
All photos and text ©Kelly DuMar 2018 unless otherwise attributed