Angie Braaten is our host today at http://www.ethicalela.com for the 15th day of #VerseLove2024. You can read her full prompt, along with the poems and comments of others, here. Today, Angie inspires us to write elegies in the style of Clint Smith. You can read two of Clint Smith’s poems here:
Clint Smith’s “Playground Elegy” and “No More Elegies Today”
Honey Buttered Toast
Today I will
write a poem
about a dog eating honey buttered toast
it will not be a metaphor for a land of milk and honey or savior-style pet rescue
it will not be an allegory for a character named Boo Radley, white as a ghost, who saved people, found standing behind a door
but rather about bottled wildflowers
sweetly spun nectar of honeybees
dancing through the meadow, kissing blossoms
but rather about buttery cream
freshly churned from Guernseys
grazing green grasses of the meadow
but rather about chaffed wheat
grain gleaned from the meadow
ground and baked and sliced and toasted
but rather about the blending of ordinary meadow things
that become the extraordinary
when the world doesn’t want to read another dog poem
Common Threads 