Thank you, everyone, for all of your wonderful suggestions! So much great poetry to choose from. The truth is, our choice, Kevin Prufer's poem, Seeds, was our immediate choice because it resonates for both Carolee and I, what with hospitals and mortality being our own personal "white elephants" of late.
We hope you approve, enjoy, read, think, respond! Discussion begins today and will continue through Saturday, April 19. Sunday, April 20, we will post a prompt related to this poem. You will have all of TV Turnoff Week (April 21-27) to write a poem! (Aren't we thoughtful?) Then, Sunday, April 27, you can come back and post the links to your new poems.
Consider the entire month of April your "free-for-all!" After all, many of us are attempting the 30 poems in 30 days challenge, and that is tough enough!
Thanks for poeming with us!
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3 comments:
from Therese--Recently I had a medical scare (which has not yet entirely gone away). For me, this poem captures how it felt for me to come to a full understanding that "this could be it". I wasn't frantic. Instead, I felt a deep, quiet, animal cautiousness. My senses lingered over the things and people I loved as if I were seeing their preciousness for the first time. I get that same sense from this poem. Isolated image by isolated image, the poem turns slowly, cautiously, towards the last heartbreaking possibility. (Jane Hirshfield has talked about the importance of "indirection" in poetry.) The poem's first few lines create a painterly "still-life" composition with green, orange, red, and blue organic forms (seeds) that may represent death-in-life ("vanitas" style of painting). But the last few lines of the poem drain to white: white moon, white nurses, white halls, white bedsheets. This poem is an interior monologue or reverie in which the speaker first observes, then recalls the onion-man, then finally turns to address directly the beloved one. But within this talk is the seed of non-talk, of silence (the "unable to call" muteness at the end). Within any one thought is the seed of the next thought (this is how the poem moves via its lines). Within everything is the seed of something else.
Therese, you always have such wonderful insights into poems. You bring my understanding to a new level. Thank you.
I see the use of such small and insignificant things to focus the reader throughout the poem. Prufer uses the images of seeds, blood drops, pills, and the drips from broken faucets. This poem reads like a meditation on the small things around us and serves to free the reader up to slide into the larger emotional unknowns.
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