Fran Haley of North Carolina and I are hosting this week’s writing prompts at http://www.ethicalela.com for the November Open Write. You can read today’s prompt below or here on the website. We’d love to have you join us as we write and share!
Give Me This – an Ada Limon-inspired Poem
Our Host
Kim Johnson, Ed.D., lives on a farm in Williamson, Georgia, where she serves as District Literacy Specialist for Pike County Schools. She enjoys writing, reading, traveling, camping, sipping coffee from souvenir mugs, and spending time with her husband and three rescue schnoodles with literary names – Boo Radley (TKAM), Fitz (F. Scott Fitzgerald), and Ollie (Mary Oliver). You can follow her blog, Common Threads: Patchwork Prose and Verse, at www.kimhaynesjohnson.com.
Inspiration
As part of Sarah Donovan’s Healing Kind book club, Fran Haley and I will be facilitating a discussion of The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon in April to celebrate National Poetry Month. Preparing for these conversations led us to choose several of Limon’s poems this week as inspirations for topic, form, or title. In Give Me This, Limon watches a groundhog steal her tomatoes and envies the freedom of this creature in the delights of rebellion.
Process
Use Limon’s poem as a theme or topic, form, or title (or combination of these) to inspire your own Give Me This poem.
Kim’s Poem
I’m using a moment I would love to re-live, a moment I did not want to pull away from, as my inspiration for today’s poem, and I’m choosing the Nonet form, in which each numbered line from 1-9, or from 9-1 has that many syllables on each. I’m writing a nonet and a reverse nonet to form a concrete (shape) poem resembling a prairie dog’s hideout.
Give Me Prairie Dogs
I didn’t want to leave our hotel~
prairie dogs were entertaining
me to no end, their antics
suspicious, unaware
of my watching them
skittering…. then
standing still….
seeking
ground
How
could a
famous row
of graffiti’ed
buried Cadillacs
come close to competing
with Amarillo sunrise
prairie dogs in sheer merriment
of their Tru Hotel fenced-in playground?
Your turn.
Common Threads 