A Poetry Challenge

I don’t like having to pay to have a book published. It doesn’t seem the right way to go about getting published. This is a challenge, though. Write 21 poems in 21 days. That certainly seems doable and sounds like a fun way to go about this. I’ll post my first poem here, and I’ll post a few as I work through them, but I’m not going to post them all. (That’s what the book is for!)

To make things easier for myself, I looked up several poets and worked out the themes of their poems. I wrote those down and now I have a list of poems to write for each day. We’ll see how this turns out!

The Prologue

The world we all live in is not for understanding

With only formulas made of words. The best I can say is,

I have been a branch and leaves. Birds

Have visited me. The wind talked and whispered

for hours on end, and I could breathe. The best I can say is,

The linoleum floor, dusty but cool. The crack

Of black closet door where it doesn’t reach the floor.

The heaviness of language takes tomato flowers

And makes them into clocks. Or drums.

It used to be that I could breathe.